Boca Box lineup

I'm liking the marine reception on the Boca Box feed, so I will leave that group active for a while to see how it is during the week. There was some humorous stuff during the past week that piqued my interest.

I have locked out the police traffic as it is not the purpose of this feed and is far too active for my wishes. The cops made good test traffic to see how the feed was working early on, but now we will only hear from the police if there is a large incident involving them.

So the lineup is now marine simplex channels in the Boca Raton area, Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, and Deerfield Beach fire departments, and FEC and CSX railroads in the Boca area.

Because I have remote control capability I sometimes focus on one of these, particularly FEC in the late afternoon as the action heats up and passes right by the Boca receiver.

Enjoy!

Boca Box up to full coverage

Bote's Boca Box hears better now that it has an external antenna 30 feet up in the air.

For now I have it wide open to Boca, Boynton, Delray, and Deerfield fire, marine channels, FEC & CSX railroad, and a bunch of interop channels. I'll cut this back after I get a feel for how much traffic this generates and how far it can hear on simplex.

I was even able to pull in Broward County's and Fort Lauderdale's trunked control channels, and Hollywood's was weak but probably usable.

Palm Beach County has that obnoxiously overdriven voice on their Locution dispatch computer, so I'm not inclined to subject anybody to that racket. I pity the firefighters and paramedics who are forced to listen to it as part of their jobs.

Enjoy!

FTL stream back up

The Fort Lauderdale streaming scanner feed, code named Bote's Mixer Board, is back up. Same bat channel:

http://colostreaming.com:8102

The same program as before is carried here: FEC and CSX railroad in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area, plus occasional marine traffic when it's not too obnoxious. When there is something neat on the other pots of my mixer board I might send those to the feed, which is why you never know what you'll hear.

Enjoy!

Bote

Maybe next time

They had the wrong hard drive for the RAID array at the server's co-location facility, so the drive replacement was postponed. Maybe next time it will happen.

Boca up, but going back down for a skosh

Not 2 days after I move my Boca Raton streaming scanner feed to Boca Raton, I get notice that the host unix system that streams these feeds needs its hard drive replaced. I guess I didn't wait long enough. It seems that every time I get my feed going the machine develops another problem. Must be the electrons in my stream.

SO! Sometime tomorrow morning after the hard drive gets replaced I expect to get a call that everything was lost and I have to completely re-install the whole damned thing from scratch--again. We ought to keep a supply of hard drives with the exact image ready to slap in there once a week as each new failure crops up.

Work is getting busier, but hopefully I will get enough time this week to move the scanner to its longer-term location hooked to a real antenna. Right now it's on a back-of-set job that picks up more computer r.f. noise than desired signal, at least on the CSX and FEC railroad channels. It picks up Delray Beach's trunked system well, and Boca Raton not too bad.

Stay tuned here for updates. Not the Yahoogroup, that is dead. This is the place now.

Another outage

My feeds are down while I help recover from yet another server outage. I thought the point of a co-located server with good connectivity was to prevent this kind of outage, but it has been just one problem after another.

Somehow our partition on the virtual machine that we were allocated wound up with a corrupted operating system. I didn't think that was possible in this environment, but there it is.

The entire partition had to be wiped and reloaded to get the paying customers back online as quickly as possible. My configuration will come when it gets done, so no feed for now.

Sorry for the late notice.

Cutover to new streaming server

For several weeks I have been testing my proposed new feed that will feed the Boca Raton area through our new Shoutcast streaming audio sever.

That server has now been cut in, so you might need to reboot your streaming machines to clear their DNS cache and force them to look up colostreaming.com with the new i.p. numeric address.

For now, the "Boca" feed is monitoring Fort Lauderdale area trunked systems, including Fort Lauderdale fire and police (good for Spring Break fun) and Broward County fire's West channel and BSO channel 6A (district 5 in the wild, wild west and district 12 Oakland Park). Deerfield Beach fire is in there as well.

I will post here when the Boca feed is actually feeding Boca Raton railroad traffic and occasional public safety stuff.

Boca Raton, Florida feed testing

I am testing a new feed for the Boca Raton, Florida area.

It will carry railroad audio from both CSX (including Tri-Rail and Amtrak) and FEC (Florida East Coast Railway).

It will also be programmed with Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, and Palm Beach County public safety trunked systems.

Because the scanner can be remotely controlled via the attached computer, I will be able to steer it to active incidents should the need arise.

The antenna will be about 30 feet in the air so it should have pretty good coverage. I hope that the receiver does not get overloaded with RF garbage which would limit its effective sensitivity. Only time will tell once I get it on the air next week.

Once it is on the air it will only be temporary. It could be yanked out of there at any time in the future, so don't get too attached to it. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Look for the announcement here when it is online in Boca Raton. For now, it is feeding Fort Lauderdale and Broward County public safety traffic as a test.

That is all.

server back up, mostly

Thanks to quick work by Jeff at the co-lo facility, the Shoutcast server in Dallas is back up much faster than I anticipated. I am currently sending my stream to the old, repaired box while I configure a replacement machine.

Hopefully, the transition will go smoothly.

Server out of service

The server at the Dallas co-location facility has died, so until a replacement can be procured this feed will be unavailable. I will post here when it returns to service.

Happy New Year!