DC area feed beta test

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know-it-all
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The McLean Relay Station is back online, this time with public safety traffic from Arlington, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Fairfax, Montgomery, and the District of Confusion. The focus will be on fire traffic, with police incidents added as warranted.

McLean Relay Station streaming scanner feed. Details at the Trackstreamer blog.

I didn't realize that I would be hearing D.C. and Montgomery so well, but because the receive site is in an r.f. Bermuda Triangle nothing is 100% there. Heck, Arlington County is a just over the hill and they are spotty; must be that hill.

I just saw an announcement that Montgomery would be coming on to MDFireFeeds in the future, so when that happens I will lockout Montgomery on mine since it would be redundant; plus, my scanner will make it around the horn to the other systems more quickly with fewer systems to scan.

So give it a listen and let me know what you think. I still have to get a u.p.s. to ensure system stability and when Amazon sends me my USB to serial converter I hope to get channel tags to display in the Shoutcast 'Title' field so you can tell who is talking. They all sound the same any more. :-(

Thanks.

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NeFire242

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Good audio, and good reception for the P25 too. It went to music after about 10 minutes of listening. This must be because its a demo? Or dispatch really this bored? ha.
 

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Nahh, I am putting the finishing touches on the streaming computer, including applying XP Service Pack 3 since it had been sitting off for months and months.

It figures somebody would start listening to it right before I take it down for maintenance. :)

I hope to have it back up this evening, I'm finishing dinner now.

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So give it a listen and let me know what you think. I still have to get a u.p.s. to ensure system stability and when Amazon sends me my USB to serial converter I hope to get channel tags to display in the Shoutcast 'Title' field so you can tell who is talking. They all sound the same any more. :-(

U.P.S. installed.

USB-serial converter installed. Alpha tags active.

Because there is some duplication among the several trunked system talkgroups (shame on you C.O.G.) you might see a few rarely used ones that make no sense, but most are accurate. I only labeled the ones most likely to be heard.

Please let me know if you even see the alpha tags on your WinAmp or VLC installation. I see them on my home machine, but the one on my laptop is flaky. I'm trying different skins to see if that changes things.

Thanks! Happy Thanksgiving!

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No text tags here on Winamp.

Maybe I stole them. :)

They have magically decided to appear on my laptop as of 30 minutes ago.

It does take several minutes after you start the stream before they show up most times.

I did have to massage the lookup table to work around a small problem, but they are being sent to the Shoutcast server, to be sure.

I also found that the jumper from the hardline to the scanner was bad, so I replaced it and now the scanner can actually hear the trunked systems around here. Amazing!

Thanks for the report!

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McLean Relay Station up full time

I hope I haven't jinxed this feed by announcing that it is up "full time", but with a new u.p.s. running things and not a lot of crap running on the computer it should be OK.

I have trimmed back the demo groups to the Real Thing for less talk, more taste. So it's mainly fire action with a smattering of Fairfax County McLean/Reston police (who rarely talk unless something's bumping). Even the fire Bravo and EMS talkgroups are locked out so we don't have the millions of "weak and dizzy" and routine auto wreck calls. I'm all for quality over quantity.

The reception is stink-o at this receive site, as always, so when others come online with better signals I will happily trim back the systems that the M.R.S. monitors. This is Shoutcast so you can listen to it right away, no special software is needed. See my initial message in this thread for details.

If I ever get my web site squared away I will post the official line-up there.

Enjoy!

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Text Tags work on my iPhone too using the Tuner program, great job on the feed.
 

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McLean Relay Station back online

The McLean Relay Station scanner has been turned back on. :)

Hopefully, this mistake will not be repeated.

Enjoy!

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McLean Relay Station offline

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trusting Linksys garbage yet again and am now paying for it. I am back in Florida and will just have to wait until the next time I am in D.C. to hardwire the damned thing into the router. The WiFi there just refuses to work for more than a week it seems. I have no e.t.r. for that. I really wanted it up in time for the Inauguration, but traveling up there in Winter can be dicey; witness the recent winter storms that hampered the travel plans of millions. I'm probably more disappointed than anybody it this failure because I thought that I had pretty well bulletproofed and tested the installation and it made me look like a novice.

I was already way ahead of you on the Virginia State Police stuff. I tried to use my Creative Labs X-Fi to get stereo audio into the computer and use my old Icom to receive VSP on one stereo channel with the scanner on the other, but I simply could not get the X-Fi to work on the feed computer. I tried every trick I knew, but it just would not work. It's a great HP laptop, but only has a monaural combination mic/line input. These built-in sound devices usually cheap out like that.

It is hopeless to receive anything on high band there on the scanner, it just gets completely overloaded with the r.f. soup bombarding it from all directions. I tried receiving VSP on the feed scanner to no avail, it just hears a jumble of noise, indoor or outdoor antennas. Sorry about that, Chief.

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vacrx

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I too was wondering what had happened to this feed. Please update us when you make it back up here.
 

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Shoutcast server needs a home

As Captain Kirk and Scotty used to say, "We have another problem".

I have just been informed that the linux box that hosts all my Shoutcast feeds will be leaving the co-lo facility at the end of January, so that just trumped getting the D.C. feed back online. Wouldn't be much point if it had nowhere to send its packets.

Once I have an arrangement worked out I'll post in the obvious places.

It just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?

Happy New Year!
 
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