Bote's Mixer Board tests cops & fire

Bote's Mixer Board will be trying out public safety traffic in and around Fort Lauderdale for the next little while. The train stuff will still be available on Bote's Boca Box.

No marine channels on Boca Box for now

The Boca Box feed computer is acting flaky all of a sudden, so I have locked out the marine bank for now since I will have no access to the radio room for a couple weeks. The marine channels seem to be the most problematic, between drunken weekend warriors carrying on and on or the Coast Guard droning on with a repetitious announcement over their piss-poor sounding radio system.

I don't want the thing to go belly-up with no physical access and no remote access either and be forced to listen to the nonsense so I have made this temporary change. The rest of the public safety and railroad line-up remains unchanged.

Boca Box back up

Bote's Boca Box is back up and running.

I don't know why it was acting weird, but I didn't have time for a detailed analysis. It appeared to be running normally when I looked at the local console, but a reboot works wonders for Windows!

Boca Box up and down

I haven't figured out what is going on, but Bote's Boca Box is acting weird, so until I can get in there tomorrow to look at it the Boca feed might be up, or it might be down.

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.