What does your feed station look like?

[ramboton]

Several users have posted pics of their "Shack" but most of those are of Ham setups, my "feed station" as I call it is only for the sake of providing my feeds to RR.


RR feed station by ramboton1, on Flickr

My Feed station consists of 3 handheld scanners, a Motorola GP68 hand held radio, connected to 3 thin clients. 2 of the thin clients are Wyse 9150's while the third is a HP T5720. The Wyse units are only capable of pushing one feed each, while the HP is able to push 2 feeds with no problem.

I have a UPS to back up the computers and scanners in case of a power outage.
you will also notice an antenna splitter so that all of the radios share one antenna, and a wifi router directing all of the traffic back into the house to my Uverse router. (all of this is in a shed attached to the house)

While this seems like a lot, I already had the scanners, the GP68 radio was given to me, the rest was purchased on ebay, no one item was over $60. It was a learning experience and fun to get all setup and working.

My Feeds:
Tulare County Sheriff and CHP
Tulare County Sheriff Ch 2
Tulare County Fire
Tulare City Police Dept.

So what does your feed station look like?

[wise871]

Here is my setup for Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton Counties Fire and EMS live feed. I use a Uniden BCT15 connected to a RS Discone up in the attic. I use an IBM Lenovo R60 running Windows XP which I got on eBay. The laptop is connected via wireless but the router is in the same room so signal strength is always excellent. All the equipment is tied into a Tripp Lite SMART 1500VA which provides plenty of battery backup if power drops.

[EdmontonFireRadio]

Here is our setup for Edmonton Fire Radio.

[alabamarailfan]

Great looking feed setups, guys! Really innovative!

It would probably be easier to point you to one of the pages on my website that shows my feed setup that includes public safety audio, two railroad audio feeds as well as ATCS data feeds:
Decatur, AL Public Safety Scanner Feed - AlabamaRailfan.com

Let me know what you think and keep the pictures coming folks! I really enjoy seeing other feed providers' setups!
::john

[gewecke]

Originally Posted by EdmontonFireRadio

Here is our setup for Edmonton Fire Radio.

NICE!

n9zas

[MichaelE]

[gewecke]

Hey,I see chocalate!

73,
n9zas

[ramboton]

ha ha ha, now that is funny

[rbm]

This may not be pretty, but it works for me. (I reconfigure things often.)

On the opposite side of the room are another 11 scanners.

I'm running four feeds.
The four BCT15X scanners to the right of the monitor are the feed scanners.
(One RR feed and three 'private' feeds.)

Rich

[ramboton]

Now that is nice

[ScanYak]

This is how I do the feed from Yakima, WA. The picture of the equipment serves only to get the scanner sound and alpha tags to RadioReference servers. It also allows me to listen to the end product of the stream. I like to monitor the feed over the internet so I know it is actually working. My feed is in stereo, Fire on left & Police on the right side, hence the need for the two scanners and the convenience of a audio mixer.

One scanner is a BC780XLT (scanning Police channels) and the other is a BC246T (scanning Fire channels).
The audio goes through an audio mixer Mackie 402-VLZ3, connected to a Griffin iMic USB Audio Interface to provide the stereo input to scanner broadcaster program ProScan with ScanCast encoding software on a HP Compaq t5710 Thin Client with XP Embedded O.S.
All of the scanners, computers, modem and router have battery and generator backup power supply.

[ramboton]

nice clean setup, do the red and blue lights work? I love the old lights!

[gewecke]

There's probably a way to flash the red and blue for priority traffic!
Nice clean setup...even though I don't see a well stocked frig.
Kudos on the old 780 too.

73,
n9zas

[ScanYak]

If I hook them up to 12 volts they'll work. The blue one I used in my early days as a volunteer fire fighter before I spent 30 years as a professional. Back then volunteers could use blue, now they use green. Blue is only reserved for police in Washington State.

[NR8O]

Great posts you guys. The Wyse Thin Clients caught my eye, I've never heard of them. Is that the way to go for a low power dedicated feed server? I'm just getting my first audio feed set up and would like to keep my main computer free.

[ramboton]

I think they work great, be careful that you buy one that is running windows xp not windows ce,
They can take a little tweaking but once running they work great, I had one on 24x7 for 40 days without a re-boot, and the only reason it re-booted was a power failure.

[perry_kansas]

I am using a uniden bearcat sportcat sc150 scanner to monitor two frequencies in my county, the scanner picks up perfect reception next to the window and I simply have a single mono audio cable running from the ear phone jack on the scanner to the mic jack on my laptop that's it.

[NR8O]

Originally Posted by ramboton

I think they work great, be careful that you buy one that is running windows xp not windows ce,
They can take a little tweaking but once running they work great, I had one on 24x7 for 40 days without a re-boot, and the only reason it re-booted was a power failure.

Thanks for the info Ramboton, I'm looking at a couple of T5720's with xp but I'm wondering what the minimum memory required is. One is NX1500/512/256 and the other is NX1500 512/512. Can I get buy with the first one? Sorry for asking in the thread, I can't send PM's yet...

[ramboton]

you will need the 512/512, that is what I have and it will stream 2 feeds with no problem.

Make sure it has Windows XP Service pack 2, mine had service pack 3 and it did not leave enough room to install dotnet, so I had to downgrade to service pack2 which takes up less disk space.

[jobes]

Here is my main 996 for ScanIL