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How does a Playlist become public?
Calls - Listening via Individual Nodes no longer available
- Thread starter blantonl
- Start date
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...
JamesTheFox
Newbie
I have a question about my Calls feed regarding this new change.
I am currently the only provider within Harnett County, NC that is broadcasting the county channels (NC VIPER system) to the Calls platform. However, there are at least two other nodes I'm familiar with from monitoring the TGs that are broadcasting on the one TG that is actually repeated countywide. Those other two nodes are not located within the county, and therefore are not getting tower specific traffic for the county. My concern is that one of these nodes may take a higher priority than mine and as a result block my node from transmitting to the rest of the TGs.
So my question is, would this actually be something that can happen? I have been seeing my SDR software receiving and processing calls with none going through to my node at times, but the node still showing the activity when they were received. My entire node has only had a few calls an hour today whereas it's normally very active, and one of the other nodes has been showing up on the one TG pretty much all day with the others being dead since yesterday.
I am currently the only provider within Harnett County, NC that is broadcasting the county channels (NC VIPER system) to the Calls platform. However, there are at least two other nodes I'm familiar with from monitoring the TGs that are broadcasting on the one TG that is actually repeated countywide. Those other two nodes are not located within the county, and therefore are not getting tower specific traffic for the county. My concern is that one of these nodes may take a higher priority than mine and as a result block my node from transmitting to the rest of the TGs.
So my question is, would this actually be something that can happen? I have been seeing my SDR software receiving and processing calls with none going through to my node at times, but the node still showing the activity when they were received. My entire node has only had a few calls an hour today whereas it's normally very active, and one of the other nodes has been showing up on the one TG pretty much all day with the others being dead since yesterday.
I'm disappointed not being able to listen to my nodes for local area I'm being forced to buy a new scanner $700 to solve my problem being able to listen to All frequencies for my area
What are you trying to listen to? 30 talkgroups or frequencies is really a lot. I manage to listen to a very busy (25-30 calls / minute) trunked system with a playlist and I don't even use all 30.
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Thank you.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...forums.radioreference.com
So if I become a feed user for VHF DMR Sheriff 1 and Sheriff 2 could I use one dongle for the 2 different frequencies into SDR trunk? then I could add them into a playlist with my Ohio MARCS Talkgroups with this feature.
n0esc
Feed Provider
You won't be able to feed a DMR system using SDRTrunk. BCFY doesn't support anything other than P25 systems from SDRTrunk. You can use Trunk Recorder however. And yes, if you are approved as a node, once everything is set up and working properly, any of the DMR frequencies you ingest into Calls would then be available to add to playlists for anyone. The one limitation I am sure you are aware of is the bandwidth of the dongle, and having to be within that, but if I am looking at the system I think you are, you're well within range of that for those two frequencies.
I am glad to see playlists being available. Is there a priority to the way the list is parsed? I presume there is no preemptive aspect.
egftechman
Member
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$100 of SDRs would suffice. Get a $100 off-lease computer if you want a dedicated machine. Run Rdio-scanner on a Digital Ocean Droplet for $5/month if you want Calls type functionality on your own equipment.
Just noticed this. When in the Calls page and listening live to All Received Calls. I’m hearing transmissions that should not be broadcasted.
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Right now I'm using SDRTrunk which isn't the greatest for duplicate suppression as it tends to grab the first call, not the best. Since I can scan up to six towers on the same phase 1 C4FM system - Indiana Safe-T - that may carry a call, would it make sense to set up a separate node for each tower and let Broadcastify choose the best? This specifically would be Grant, Wabash (Somerset and Wabash city), Howard, Madison, and Blackford. I don't try to scan deep into Indianapolis as it's frequency assignment chaos there.
Before this improvement it didn't seem to matter, but now that you evaluate all the copies? Would be nice to give the best I receive.
Before this improvement it didn't seem to matter, but now that you evaluate all the copies? Would be nice to give the best I receive.
RR isn't going to be able to do decide upon quality of decode. So even though yes, you should split everything up and have separate nodes, and use the duplicate suppression by talkgroup feature, you shouldn't expect RR to determine which of the possible 6 sources gave the best decode. If you are monitoring any site that is iffy and doesn't provide 100% perfect decode nearly all the time, you probably shouldn't be feeding that node to BCFY Calls. RR is going to look at things like skew, time of arrival, and whatever other metrics Lindsay has involved. If you have six separate nodes, one of them is going to capture, decode and upload the raw audio before the others. For instance, if the transmission actually originated by a radio on the Grant tower, it is likely that will nearly always be the first one to make it to RR. The others would have a slight delay as that traffic passes through the various other site controllers that have a user affiliated with that same talkgroup.
I think Lindsay would prefer separate nodes (although I'm not sure he specifically stated that). Others do indeed do it like you currently are and are passing traffic from multiple sites to one node. But i dont think you will ever be able to get around the issue whereby the decoded audio from one site is better than the others but the audio from one of the other sites ends up being the audio accepted by RR.
Sad to see Node Listening Loophole Go away, it was great in critical incidents to immediately find the relevant TGs.
I've LOVED playlists since the day I found Broadcastify Calls, but I've always felt the 20 TG playlist max was too few. 30 is nice, but for instance, I'd love a playlist to monitor all of the Ohio MARCS Statewide Interop channels and that's 84 TGs. I'd love to be able to have a playlist to monitor all 88 county XSO-channels.
I understand even a 20-TG playlist with heavy traffic can struggle to keep up, but some of my playlists may not have traffic for literally days, but I keep them open in a browser tab just in case.
Any chance of going to 100 TG playlists?
I've LOVED playlists since the day I found Broadcastify Calls, but I've always felt the 20 TG playlist max was too few. 30 is nice, but for instance, I'd love a playlist to monitor all of the Ohio MARCS Statewide Interop channels and that's 84 TGs. I'd love to be able to have a playlist to monitor all 88 county XSO-channels.
I understand even a 20-TG playlist with heavy traffic can struggle to keep up, but some of my playlists may not have traffic for literally days, but I keep them open in a browser tab just in case.
Any chance of going to 100 TG playlists?
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When I get a bad decode, it's usually just cuts short. The real headache is on state police where the same talk group is not the same traffic across towers. That really messes with source selection.
The other gotcha is I cover some towers that no one else does so if I drop it one, all exclusive traffic simply doesn't make it to calls at all.
If you are referring to some statewide P25 system, then a particular talkgroup is going to carry the exact same traffic across any/every tower that there is a radio affiliated. For instance, TG 45192 on some P25 system, with that P25 system having 20 sites, isn't going to carry one conversation on TG 45192 on one site that is different than the conversation on TG 45192 of another site of the same system. That just isn't going to happen.
one idea to float, that i do not know is technically possible, but how about dynamic/automatic playlists for every county in RRDB? this would solve the issue of, oh, yeah i see something is going on KC today, let me jump over and see what is going on.
i would just go to the jackson county missouri page, and click on "broadcastify calls playlist" and it would load up all seen talkgroups that are in jackson county missouri.
ideas?
i would just go to the jackson county missouri page, and click on "broadcastify calls playlist" and it would load up all seen talkgroups that are in jackson county missouri.
ideas?
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Maybe I didn't explain it quite right. Lets suppose Lutheran Air gets a transport call and flies out of Wabash. Somerset is the tower closest tower to the airport and the second closest statewide tower to me. I generally get very clean reception from it. However as the chopper flies around, the tower they are on changes and often changes pretty quickly. Once they deregister from Wabash I receive nothing from THAT tower. They can quickly land on towers that are harder for me to receive but nonetheless are fairly reliable. Any single call will be the same across the statewide if there's a registered radio, but the conversation can hop around towers like a frog on a hot rock. I'm out of range of their dispatch so I'm only receiving what's sent to a chopper. I often hear parts of of other conversations when a chopper is in range of one of "my" towers. AFAIK, no one scans the base tower for their dispatch so there's no redundancy here. The obvious solution is getting a calls feed back in Allen County by their base but since they encrypt all local safety traffic this is unlikely to happen. So here we are.
Is RR/BDFY going to consider organizing playlist search results by state or county? I was searching for Lafayette PD (the one in Indiana) and mixed in, in the results drop down were also Lafayette PD (the one in Louisiana) and also mixed in the drop down were other Lafayette PD results (the on in Missouri and for several other Lafayette's). There was not enough info on the search results drop down items to tall them apart and I had to add them to my playlist, to tell which one they were then remove the unwanted ones. This is Far from ideal and I think you are risking running your website into the ground, after a nearly 30 years great run. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time a bad idea has destroyed something good. And after you burn it to the ground, people will wonder for a while how you could have ever thought it was a good idea, then they will just go find something else to do and forget about you. Because I promise you there is always the next big thing.
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