Upstate NY ATCS monitors needed

[radicalbill]

Hello railfans,

As you may already know, the D&H line, now CP Rail, has begun turning on their new ATCS wayside MCP's.

We need help in finding locations to monitor the line from Binghamton to Albany to the Canadian border.

The terrain in NYS makes it very hard to cover this line.

Unlike FL, where you can cover half the state from one monitoring site, we need about 80 people with good reception of their local MCP.

If you live near the D&H line, and can hear an MCP on 897.9375 MHz, you would be a great help if we can feed that signal to our aggregator server.

The MCP's are digital and transmitt a short digital burst once every 60 seconds. If you are real lucky, you may be able to hear more than one from your location.

If you are interested in helping, please post here, or contact me.

We have the equipment you will need, basically a radio, antenna, computer, and software, all you really need is an internet connection that is always on, like DSL, or Cable.

Thanks everyone

Bill
KC2OVX

 

[trainman111]

Unfortunately, I no longer live in Rouses Point, otherwise I'd be 100% willing to help. But, I do have a question. Is there a layout file for the D&H out there somewhere?

 

[radicalbill]

There is a layout file, but each admin for the territory has control of the layout, since they create it, and it takes hundreds of hours to make it using track builder and hundreds more hours to decode each wayside device.

The Admin for the D&H has not released the layout yet to the ATCSmonitor yahoo group.

There are a lot of "closet" monitors that monitor just their closest MCP's and don't want to be part of a larger group out of security concerns, or privacy concerns.

I have asked hundreds of people and companies if I could use their sites and I explained what I was doing and that I had the equipment and all they would need to have is an Internet connection, and those that did not say no right off the bat, said no when I said it needed an Internet connection.

I have a monitoring station here in Waterford that feeds CPO-4 & CPO-5, which is the Watervliet yard and Mark, who is the admin, he managed to get a monitoring site in Mechanicville that feeds CPO-17 and the new CPF-468, but that is all we have at the moment.

Therre is a small layout that I created that is in the file section of ATCSmonitor group on yahoo, it is under CP Rail , Colonie

It has the layout and the other info needed to monitor the line, the little bit of it that we have covered.

You have to join the group to get it, but if you are interested in ATCS, you should join, it is a great resource.

I found out about this totally by accident when I attended a meeting in Cohoes with the mayor and CP Rail and asked what the antennas were that they had put up at each crossing in the city.

There is also a site called www dot codeline-telemetry dot com that has all the territories and server addresses listed and a map that shows where each Control Point is on the map.

It also has daily logs for movement on each line that is covered.

great resource.

Thanks

Bill
KC2OVX

 

[trainman111]

Bill,
Check your PM's.

Nick