Broadcastify Calls (Link: Broadcastify Calls), our full-featured managed radio calls ingest platform, has seen extensive growth over the past few years. Calls now has over 600 nodes actively sending calls into the network, greatly expanding our coverage. We estimate that over 35% of all Law Dispatch and Fire Dispatch trunked system groups in the RadioReference database are now covered by Broadcastify Calls nodes. Over the past few months we recently completed a development sprint of updates and new features and functionality outlined below:
Playlist Management Updates
Playlists on Broadcastify Calls are an extremely powerful tool. Users can build playlists to watch and listen to any group captured across the entire network.
We recently increased the amount of groups you can have in a single playlist from 20 to 30, and we've added a group browser directly in the playlist editor which allows users to add groups to a playlist by location and service tag. This allows users to quickly build playlists to monitor what they want to hear. See the screenshot below:
Discussion around the new playlist management features are here:
forums.radioreference.com
Public Playlists Now Available
We now have the ability to make a Broadcastify Calls playlists available to the general public and we publish those playlists on Broadcastify's county page. We've currently published approximately 40 different playlists for popular areas. See the screenshot below as an example:
If you have a personal playlist you've created for a specific location that would be a good fit for the general public, send us a support request to support@broadcastify with the link to the playlist and the county you would like it assigned to, and we'll evaluate it for publishing to the public. Discussion about public playlists can be found here:
forums.radioreference.com
County Pages Coverage Browser
You can now browse for groups that are available on Broadcastify calls directly from a county page. This new feature is handy if there is an incident or event going on in a specific county - you can browse all groups captured for that county on one single page, and see when groups were last captured to determine which groups are active in a county. See below:
New Duplicate Call Detection Algorithm
One of the greatest features of the Broadcastify Calls platform is the ability for multiple nodes to cover the same systems and areas. This allows a method of redundancy given that the vast majority of the contributing nodes are provided by volunteers. Because of this, we need a solid way to manage what we do when we receive the same transmission, or call, from multiple nodes around the same time.
Previously, we managed duplicate calls be received by checking by comparing calls as they were received by timestamp and group ID and then rejecting ones that matched. This was terribly inefficient and didn't take into account quick calls in succession and different types of capturing software running on the 600+ nodes in the network.
We are now handing duplicate management by building a table in memory, of all nodes that are contributing calls for each specific group. We then continuously, dynamically rank those nodes based on the quality of the node. That quality ranking is primarily a function of how low the node' "skew" is (skew is a function of how "slow" the node is), and how long the node has been providing calls for that group. As calls come in from all the nodes, we assign each group a node that will exclusively provide calls for that group, all the while constantly evaluating the health and ranking of all the nodes providing the group. If the system detects that another node is starting to rank higher, we'll start "reconsidering" the currently assigned node, and after a select amount of reconsiderations we'll switch the groups assigned node if it warrants it.
The result has been a dramatically reduced amount of duplicate calls brought into the network and much better user experience for a Broadcastify Calls users. Discussion about these changes are covered here:
forums.radioreference.com
SDRTrunk Conventional Channel Support
Broadcastify calls now supports SDRTrunk conventional analog FM and digital channels. See the SDRTrunk docs for more details
github.com
Broadcastify Calls API
An API is being developed for our mobile app partners to bring Broadcastify Calls functionality to the app stores. We hope to have this released to our partners in the next few months.
Playlist Management Updates
Playlists on Broadcastify Calls are an extremely powerful tool. Users can build playlists to watch and listen to any group captured across the entire network.
We recently increased the amount of groups you can have in a single playlist from 20 to 30, and we've added a group browser directly in the playlist editor which allows users to add groups to a playlist by location and service tag. This allows users to quickly build playlists to monitor what they want to hear. See the screenshot below:
Discussion around the new playlist management features are here:
Broadcastify Calls - New Playlist Management Features
You guys asked for a groups browser where you can mass add groups to your Broadcastify Calls playlists by location and tag. It's now available. It will show you groups captured within the last 30 days. I'm sure there are some bugs, let me hear about them. Enjoy!
Public Playlists Now Available
We now have the ability to make a Broadcastify Calls playlists available to the general public and we publish those playlists on Broadcastify's county page. We've currently published approximately 40 different playlists for popular areas. See the screenshot below as an example:
If you have a personal playlist you've created for a specific location that would be a good fit for the general public, send us a support request to support@broadcastify with the link to the playlist and the county you would like it assigned to, and we'll evaluate it for publishing to the public. Discussion about public playlists can be found here:
Calls - Public Playlists Now Available
I've rolled out two public playlists for testing https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/2579 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/2699 If you are a calls provider and want to "publish a list" to a county, start building your playlists and soon I'll reach out here to solicit you to let...
County Pages Coverage Browser
You can now browse for groups that are available on Broadcastify calls directly from a county page. This new feature is handy if there is an incident or event going on in a specific county - you can browse all groups captured for that county on one single page, and see when groups were last captured to determine which groups are active in a county. See below:
New Duplicate Call Detection Algorithm
One of the greatest features of the Broadcastify Calls platform is the ability for multiple nodes to cover the same systems and areas. This allows a method of redundancy given that the vast majority of the contributing nodes are provided by volunteers. Because of this, we need a solid way to manage what we do when we receive the same transmission, or call, from multiple nodes around the same time.
Previously, we managed duplicate calls be received by checking by comparing calls as they were received by timestamp and group ID and then rejecting ones that matched. This was terribly inefficient and didn't take into account quick calls in succession and different types of capturing software running on the 600+ nodes in the network.
We are now handing duplicate management by building a table in memory, of all nodes that are contributing calls for each specific group. We then continuously, dynamically rank those nodes based on the quality of the node. That quality ranking is primarily a function of how low the node' "skew" is (skew is a function of how "slow" the node is), and how long the node has been providing calls for that group. As calls come in from all the nodes, we assign each group a node that will exclusively provide calls for that group, all the while constantly evaluating the health and ranking of all the nodes providing the group. If the system detects that another node is starting to rank higher, we'll start "reconsidering" the currently assigned node, and after a select amount of reconsiderations we'll switch the groups assigned node if it warrants it.
The result has been a dramatically reduced amount of duplicate calls brought into the network and much better user experience for a Broadcastify Calls users. Discussion about these changes are covered here:
Broadcastify Calls Duplicate Calls Handing Updates
TLDR: We're testing a new algorithm for duplicate calls handling on the following systems: https://www.broadcastify.com/calls/trs/3508 https://www.broadcastify.com/calls/trs/100 https://www.broadcastify.com/calls/trs/7494 https://www.broadcastify.com/calls/trs/7349 Details I've written a new...
SDRTrunk Conventional Channel Support
Broadcastify calls now supports SDRTrunk conventional analog FM and digital channels. See the SDRTrunk docs for more details
GitHub - DSheirer/sdrtrunk: A cross-platform java application for decoding, monitoring, recording and streaming trunked mobile and related radio protocols using Software Defined Radios (SDR). Website:
A cross-platform java application for decoding, monitoring, recording and streaming trunked mobile and related radio protocols using Software Defined Radios (SDR). Website: - DSheirer/sdrtrunk
github.com
Broadcastify Calls API
An API is being developed for our mobile app partners to bring Broadcastify Calls functionality to the app stores. We hope to have this released to our partners in the next few months.
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