Overhead of monitoring the whole area

[rachelbythebay]

Hi everyone,

I've been using a custom software rig to pull in the stuff I want to listen to, which is mostly the Santa Clara city system. I went this route because just using my standalone scanner wasn't cutting it. First, they rebanded and my scanner won't follow it, and second because of the obvious problem of missing overlapping calls. I don't want to miss out on a fire call just because the police are working something at the same time.

So I see people talking about wanting (for instance) more San Jose PD coverage, or split coverage of the SCCSO frequencies (P25 and all) and now I'm in a quandry. On the one hand, I could start throwing hardware and software at the problem. On the other hand, it costs real money to buy these things, develop the systems, and keep them running.

I guess I'm not sure if there is critical mass to drive this sort of thing. If people are generally happy with the current state of affairs in terms of available feeds, then it seems status quo will rule.

Or am I all wrong?

 

[Ben96cal]

When it comes down to it, it's a hobby... No point in spending tons of YOUR money to make others happy and fatten others advertising unless you have the money to do so and still eat and get around..

 

[rachelbythebay]

That's just it, right? I'm only running enough stuff to track the things I want to track. You'd think enough people would get tired of missing calls because there's too much going on at the same time. Having a bunch of agencies sitting on a single feed will eventually lead to disappointment.

My own interest in San Jose PD is when something crosses over and starts being handled with both SC and SJ units. The most recent example was last week's "bait bike" thief chase which had units from both agencies running up and down the Guadalupe River trail levee system. There's a bunch of stuff which would have gotten away if it hadn't been time shifted across channels.

Then there was the whole Cupertino man hunt thing. SCPD units were called out to provide assistance and their "bearcat" vehicle, and the whole mess eventually wound up spanning over to BayMACS and then SCCSO channels.

I guess my dilemma is that I want to have those channels being logged all the time just in case there's more "crossover" stuff, but I don't want to rig all that stuff up if nobody else wants to follow it. In theory, it should be possible to create a huge multi-agency source list where you can switch sources (channels and/or talkgroups) in and out of your own personal timeline and follow whatever you want.

In practice, though, I'm not sure there is a market for it.

 

[Ben96cal]

Personally I don't think there's a big enough audience to throw a bunch of money... If you want to buy another and split between 2 then I think that would be worth it but to buy a bunch of equipment just to put a free feed up... It's awesome you're willing but ya gotta think of your wallet first unless someone is willing to step up and donate some scanners and stuff. I'm a junkie and have 14 scanners that I listen to agencies from redding- grapevine on.. But just for my personal use.

 

[rachelbythebay]

Oh, sorry, to be clear, I have no intention of providing a free feed for all of this stuff. I'm going to keep listening to those signals which interest me, but I'm not going to stand up any others without a good reason.