Happy New Year - 78P911 and other updates.

First off, HAPPY NEW YEAR...  While it might not look like it things have been very busy for me around here for the past month+ or so.  But I have been able to spend most of the last few days working on the scanner feeds... First off not many know but each feed all 35+ has a computer just for it.  Trying to keep all 35 running has been a chore.. Not to mention the power bills.  The reason being each encoder/feed was it's own box was the software program I used to archive the audio for each feed would not take installing separate copies of itself on a box. I had put off building a server based archiving system as i only had a handful of feeds and the effort to building something that would archive off the icecast server was just not a priority.  Well this little animal has grown... Grown to something that is making management of it taking more time.  Time which I need to put towards building out new feeds or features.  So I set out to build a server based archiving system like some of the larger feed providers ( radioreference and liveatc.net ) have on there hosting of feeds for people.  After some playing with different ideas I have finaly got a system working on my test vm's.  So I have gone and purchased the hardware to build the production version of it. The hardware is currently burning in as we speak and if I can get to it this weekend will have the final con-fig put in it and launched for all of you.  The new system is real-time to the web as well.. so no more waiting for me to compress and upload the archives to the ftp server... You will be able to browse right to it and pull the files off in real-time.  With the archive hurdle out of the way I was able to look at putting multiple sound cards into one host PC.  I ordered 50 USB sound cards to get started off ebay.  With a few USB hubs I can start putting many feeds on one computer.  So for my first test since the 78p911 computer still was having issues I picked up the radio and computer from the tower site in fenton Twp. and brought it to my house where I have the 78F911 800 feed.  I slapped one of the USB sound cards into the fire encoders computer and setup the levels.  So far it has been working well.  The end game is rather then getting a bunch of cheap computers using one redundant computer per site with how ever many sound cards it can run without issue.  Next weekend I hope to get to lansing and convert the 6 feed computers out there into one and also add 2-3 more ingham county trunked feeds.

Last night I went to the tower site in howell to install gear to feed Livingston EMS and the local ham repeater.  The EMS audio will be used for the 2tone alerts.  I have been testing vhf fire alerts for about a month or so but before I made those public wanted to get EMS up and running as well.  Look for those feed links and alert sign up pages shortly.  Speaking of fire alerts the system received over 6,525 tone outs in December and sent 108,029 messages to the subscribers that month.  I have been testing some twitter integrations on some of the alert channels as well.  Once I get them all setup will put the info for the twitter and rss feeds up here on the pages as well.

Again as always thank you all for the donations that coming in to help keep everything running and expanding.  With out it growth would be slow if not at all.

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Fredric Moses - W8FSM
fred@moses.bz