Dania Fire merges with Broward County

Dania Beach Fire Department became part of Broward Sheriff Office's Department of Fire and Rescue on January 29, 2011.

The Dania Beach department, Broward's oldest, will become the seventh municipality with BSO Fire Rescue. The others are: Cooper City, Lauderdale Lakes, Pembroke Park, Southwest Ranches, West Park and Weston. BSO Fire Rescue also serves Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the unincorporated areas of the county.

It is unclear on what final radio channels Dania fire will operate. Since the switch:

• Broward Joint Ops 1 (formerly 12A) has been used as an intercom between Broward and Hollywood fire main dispatch for automatic aid (mutual aid) calls;
• Broward JOps 2 (12B) has been patched with Hollywood fire dispatch, although the dispatcher's transmissions do not always come through reliably on 12B;
• Broward JOps 3 (12C) has been patched with Broward Dispatch 2 (formerly Fire North channel) for Hollywood units running mutual aid into Dania;
• Broward JOps 4 (12D) is patched to Hollywood fire tac 1 N for Dania units running mutual aid into Hollywood.

This sounds more confusing than it needs to be, but the situation is fluid and there will likely be changes in the future. Up until this switch Broward would assign any of 12B, 12C, or 12D for fire units to conduct training drills, but these same channels were also used on working incidents for interoperability communications which was confusing. Now when you see JOps 1, 2, 3, or 4 you can assume it has something to do with Dania or Hollywood fire calls.

Dania fire and Hollywood police and fire used to operate on their own separate system that is also a site hung off the Broward trunking zone controller. Since the switch Dania units must be operating on the Joint Ops talkgroups, presumably until they get their radios programmed to add the usual line-up of Broward fire channels.

Hollywood police and fire radio channels remain unchanged, only Dania has moved over to the Broward core system for daily operations.

Tornado watch

South Florida is under a tornado watch and the strong cold front is barreling through now. Strong gusty winds are knocking out power around the area so the feeds might go down. They'll be back up when FP&L restores power should that happen.

Key West air radio gone

I locked out the aircraft comms group on the Southernmost Feed. It was talking just a bit too much and most of the traffic was the same: routing via Boca Chica departure, then BAITZ, then CARNU, then direct blah, blah, blah. Sometimes some interesting stuff, but not enough to have it stopping there instead of real interesting stuff on police or fire channels.

We still have Key West police and fire, Monroe County, FLA police and fire, and most marine channels (when they're not being totally obnoxious, that is).

Host down

The host where our server sits in Dallas is down. No reason nor e.t.r. published.

They posted a note on their Twitter feed about a maintenance window last night, but this unexpected outage started after midnight this morning. It's not just colostreaming.com that is down, I mean the host's own support and main sales web site is kaput! So it's safe to assume that they know about it and are running around like crazy trying to put out the fires to get things back up and running, no need to tell them the obvious.

All of my feeds will return when the host comes back up. Stay warm out there!

UPDATE: VirtBiz had a power main that supplies electricity to part of their colo facility fail on them overnight. It was restored by that afternoon and all our feeds came back up normally. I think they need to give Emerson Liebert a call about a big-ass u.p.s. for their facility; this keeps happening too frequently it seems.

Winterfest Boat Parade

Fort Lauderdale hosts the annual Winterfest Boat Parade of Lights this evening starting at 18:30 E.S.T. It's a pretty big deal with viewers lining the shore of the IntraCoastal Waterway from Lauderdale up to Pompano Beach.

I have restricted Bote's Wild Feed to SEARCH on the Fort Lauderdale trunked system in case any new talkgroups pop up. You will hear traffic that is not normally heard on that feed for the duration of this special event.

Fantasy Fest Begins

Fantasy Fest begins in Key West, Florida this week. Expect the EMS and police to be extra busy this week and into next weekend as partyers from all around converge on Key West for body painting, dancing, and assorted drunken travails.

The Key West online scanner stream should be rocking and rolling as next weekend approaches. I have still not solved the problem of the random dropouts, so if the stream stops or goes to the intermission music just start your player again.

Enjoy!

Better Audio Coming

I have figured out a way to employ the outstanding Volume Logic plug-in for WinAmp to boost the weak sauce audio that digital trunked systems emit.

I have installed the upgrade on the Key West feed just now.

I will install it on the Broward County feeds shortly.

Key West Poker Run

Poker? I don't even know her!

So this weekend is the Poker Run during which a bunch of party animals ride their motorcycles down U.S. 1 to Key West while picking up poker chips along the way. I don't know what they do with the chips once they get there, but it's a big deal.

I heard the Key West police switch to tatical channel 2 for a detail and it has to be for the Poker Run. To capture any traffic and new talkgroups I have locked out everything else, so no marine nor aircraft traffic for the weekend.

It should be interesting listening. Enjoy!

Key West DSL better

The Key West feed has been switched to a reliable DSL link from the Comcast cable modem link.

It turns out that Comcast has made no provisions for backup power in Key West, so when the electricity goes out, which it does often, Comcast subscribers lose their Internet connection. It didn't matter that we had a big bruiser UPS battery backup supply running the local equipment because the other end of the link was down when the power went out.

Those days are over. We now have the ability to stay online upwards of several hours. And that's precisely the time when the Key West feed should get pretty interesting.

Broward feeds stabilized

I have rewired the spaghetti that carries my DSL through my house and went from a marginal 6.0dB signal/noise receive ratio up to 23.0dB s/n as reported by my Westell 6100 DSL modem. The reported data rate is back up to what I am paying for and web pages now load better than dial-up speed. Happy days are here again.

This also means that Bote's Mixer Board and Bote's Wild Feed should be as reliable as they were before the DSL changes took their toll.

One of these days I have to re-install the original machine so that the Mixer Board streamer quits crashing. For now if it crashes I have to intervene manually to restart it. Ya get what ya pay for.