Streaming Problems- Multiple Feeds

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TW06

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A couple of months ago I decided to upgrade my streaming setup, I stream 3 feeds to RR. I use Three conventional business radios. My initial setup was a Dell Tower with a internal sound card and 2 PCI cards. That setup worked flawlessly, however I had a tone of cables and a tower and a power supply just thrown together. I decided since I could now see people were in fact listening to this I decided to dump some money into this project. I purchased a Rack enclose, a rack mount pc case, a rack mount power supply and tossed in a pre amp I had laying around. I order a motherboard, processor and ram, tossed in a hard drive and installed XP. I added 2 Low profile PCI sound cards as this is in a 2U case. Hooked it all up and setup radio feed. Excellent all three feeds are streaming…

So I’m monitoring it one day and what is that very week station I hear on my feed, well its one of the two other radios that I’m streaming. So obviously I’m having a Cross-Talk issue, I’m not sure if its hardware of software.

Also I bought a couple of USB sound cards, not the el-cheapo ones but a little nicer ones and they give me the same problems the cross talk is horrible.

I know I rambled on a little but does anyone have any ideas its really starting to bug me.
 

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OCO

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Is there mixer control for each or the sound cards? If so, have you muted all non-used inputs? Also, one of the vendor supplied sound card mixers I used in the past had a "what I hear" that if not muted would cause problems. Assume you are using line input, not mic input....

If I were troubleshooting I'd also try to determine if the cross talk was common from all three sources or just from one to the other two. You should be able to use a tone generator as input for testing (I've used a laptop with one of several different freeware tone generators)...
 
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Same problem

I stream 3 feeds to RR to. But on they are on seperates pc (2 deskstop and 1 laptop). I have cross-talk on 2 feeds. They have only 2 things in communs: Wi-Fi connection true a Router and RR audio server.

Feed 1 is on audio1.radioreference.com
Feed 2 is on audio9.radioreference.com
Feed 3 is on audio1.radioreference.com

That's right! Feed 1 and Feed 3 cross-talk each other...
 
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gmclam

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What a contrast

I stream 3 feeds to RR. I use Three conventional business radios. My initial setup was a Dell Tower with a internal sound card and 2 PCI cards. That setup worked flawlessly, however I had a ton of cables and a tower and a power supply just thrown together. I decided to dump some money into this project. I purchased a Rack enclosure, a rack mount pc case, a rack mount power supply and tossed in a pre amp I had laying around. I order a motherboard, processor and ram, tossed in a hard drive and installed XP. I added 2 Low profile PCI sound cards as this is in a 2U case. Hooked it all up and setup radio feed. Excellent all three feeds are streaming…
I bought a very cheap PC from someone off CraigsList. I added 10 USB sound cards I bought from eBay for $1 each. I am using scanners that are either crystal controlled or don't trunk track rebanded MOT systems. I stream 2 feeds to RR with an optional 3rd and have several "private streams".

No real money spent. No fancy equipment. Scanners being used that would otherwise just be sitting idle. Works great as long as my Internet connection stays alive.
 
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I would like to say that I do not blame directly the Radioreference audio servers to be the cause of the problem, but just make my observation as a possible solution. I will do tests with a tone generator and I gives you some news.
 

gmclam

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I will do tests with a tone generator and I gives you some news.
I'll just set a scanner to an NOAA weather frequency for testing. That way I am hearing audio from a scanner and can more closely set levels prior to going live with normal scanner channel(s).
 
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Problem solve!

I found the reason for the problem. This is a return of sound through the splitter / amplifier Electroline. Scanners that had the cross-talk was connected to the same antenna via the splitter. I just change the antenna and the cross-talk has stopped. There are two possible problems. First, this may be it caused by the coaxial cable itself. Second, it is possible that is because the power adapter for the splitter / amplifier was connected to the same power bar as the infected computer. Perhaps there is a filter or other thing to do to avoid this interference.
 

gmclam

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One issue is how you get audio out of the scanner. Many models, especially hand-helds, only have a headphone jack and neither side is ground. They wire them so a user can plug in a stereo or mono headset and have both ears work.

If you're getting audio from such a source, there's a huge ground loop when connecting multiple scanners. Typically one of the power connections is ground and so is the shield side of the antenna signal.

I avoided using headphone jacks (that means using base model scanners or modifying the connections in the scanner to the jack) as well as adding audio isolation transformers on the outputs of each scanner. Each audio signal feeds a separate USB sound card. All antenna connections come from a multicoupler and grounded together.
 

GordonE

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Radio Shack sells audio ground loop isolators that can help, when I had several scanners connected to an antenna multi-coupler I needed to use audio ground loop isolators to address this problem. Once isolator can be used for every two mono feeds.

-- Gordon
 
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