Edmonton Fire Radio popup java player

[EdmontonFireRadio]

We have added a new popup radio player (requires Java) to the EFR website. This will allow listeners to have easy access to the feed while doing other things on their computer (surf the web, check email, etc). This player is compatible with text tags once we roll out that feature.

You can launch the player here

The link will download a small file to your computer (radio skin, playlist, etc) and then will connect to our audio servers. The left audio channel is Edmonton Fire/EMS. The right audio channel is STARS Air Ambulance.

 

[kayn1n32008]

love the changes that you have made to the live audio. i am not that big on listening to the fire/ems but i love being able to listen to STARS now. and most days that i am home i will have it on in the background as i do right now

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

Thanks, kayn1n32008. One of the reasons we were looking for a way to listen to just STARS or just FD/EMS is that we have listeners from various agencies outside of Edmonton that use our feed to keep an ear on what is happening. One example Alberta Air Ambulance tunes in to know when they may be needed for a transfer. Listening to the feed they can get a bit of advance notice. They don't really care about FD/EMS very much but want to be able to listen to STARS. So being able to turn off the audio from the FD/EMS it makes the feed a little more useable for them.

Thanks for listening. If you have any ideas or suggestions feel free to pass them along.

Jeff
Edmonton Fire Radio

 

[kayn1n32008]

I cant think of anyway to improve such a great set-up. It is great just the way it is.

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

Thank you for the kind words, kayn1n32008.

 

[MrVelvet]

So, is there a simple way to launch the Java player once its installed?

Or do I need to click that link every time?

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

MrVelvet, I just tried to save the file to my desktop and it seemed to work quite well. Made launching very quick and easy.

 

[kayn1n32008]

What would be involved in having a seperate STARS only feed? The only small draw back of the stereo feed is that once you are finished listening you have to remember to re-set the audio balance.

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

For us to setup a STARS only feed we would need another feed computer (or add a second sound card in the current one), a radio that we could dedicate 24/7 to STARS only. We would also need to pay for an additional server. Yes, we could host it here on Radio Reference for free, but I don't see any advantage of doing so at this point in time. One may think that by hosting a feed on a site such as this one could increase listener counts. But looking at the listener counts for the current Alberta feeds I wonder if that would really be the case. Using the current Alberta feeds hosted on RR, Lethbridge has 0 listeners and Red Deer has 1. Right now on server 1 we have 26 listeners and on server 2 we have 33. And this is a quiet evening.

Here are our listener stats for the month of October:

Number of unique listeners - 8437
Countries - 99
Top countries - Canada, United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, France, South Africa, New Zealand, Russian Federation & Japan
Average listen length - 71 minutes
Top way to tune in - iTunes followed closely by Winamp

The other thing we would need to think about is how many people would be interested in a STARS only feed. STARS is quiet 90% of the time, so there really wouldn't be all that much activity. You could go for hours and not even hear anything but the usual morning and evening radio test.

The reason we paired it up with the Edmonton FD/EMS feed is that from time to time STARS is called for an event within the city. Makes for interesting listening when the units on the ground switch over to provincial EMS 1 to talk with STARS as they approach the landing site.

I hope this helped to answer your question. If there were a lot of interest in a STARS only feed it would be something that we wouldn't mind considering. But to pay the cost to buy the equipment to set one up as well as to pay the monthly server costs and then only have a few listeners with the feed empty the majority of the time would really be a tough sell with the rest of the family.

 

[Jay911]

My big gripe is that no live scanners will get past the firewall which blocks all non-web ports here at work.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Good reasons not to have the STARS feed seperate, Yesterday afternoon was a good example of how quiet they can be, i think i heard one radio test and a couple of kerchunks most of the afternoon/evening untill STAR-3 was tasked to go to Barrhead.

I would be interesting to see what the listener numbers would be like if Calgary Police/Fire/EMS were on RR live audio.


One question for you, how many RF channels are scanned on the STARS feed?

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

Jay, give this link a try for the Edmonton feed and let me know if it works for you. It is supposed to be a web proxy but I haven't talked with anyone with a firewall issue that could give it a try for me - http://cast.sc13.shoutcaststreaming.us/client/proxy.php?stream=c8118

kayn1n32008, the radio that we use for the STARS portion of the feed is a dual band Kenwood TH-D7. It has the equivalent of two radios in one in that you can listen to two frequencies at the same time instead of scanning between multiple frequencies but hearing only one at a time. I used this radio primarily as a portable ham rig until I picked up my mobile radio. When out and about 5 watts is ok but I found that I got out of repeater range rather quickly so my 50 watt mobile does a much better job.

The radio is setup on the STARS main repeater as well as provincial EMS 1. This way people can still listen in if STARS switches from the repeater over to simiplex and I'm not around to control the radio.

 

[EdmontonFireRadio]

We used a URL shortening service to shorten the address for the EFR JAVA player. Here's the more "manageable" one http://bit.ly/26v95K