RailRoadFan.com

Hey what if you put a ground lift on the PC does that seem to eliminate the hum?

Z, and i swapped scanners on the rig. Changed to a Standard C156A, which seemed to get rid of the ground hum, time will tell how much it increases reception

A new Yaesu FT-1900R has arrived today That'll replace the current scanner, and hope to have that up and working later tonight.

Finally, a great update!

The Yaesu FT-1900R is in place, scanning Grand Rapids and getting great results so far. Heard D700 going by the Zeeland defect detector, then calling out the Zeeland signal. Later heard them clearing MP 27 south of Holland.
Can hear Amtrak downtown, maintainers working there, and sorta picking up the conductor on the ground throwing switches.
Reception seems to be much more clear, and after seeing what kind of range this gets, make up a map showing the different areas that are being called out.
Edit: Can hear Q334 going by East end Elmdale

from my experience, the feed is too hot to the sound card... Might look into either reducing the volume of the radio, or putting a compressor/limiter on the radio output. EG maintainer too soft, RN dispatcher too loud/over modulated.

& Squelch could afford to be bumped up a notch.

Changed a number of settings on the scanner feed so the audio would be picked up better. Also bumped up the squelch a notch.

Today I moved my wireless router upstairs, so I put this streaming PC on wireless. Didn't work well with the first USB adapter I used, so I put in a good wireless PCI card version. Let me know if you hear it cut out at all, as in it just stops streaming or the wireless connection drops out. I've used this card reliably in my main PC for about a year without issues, so it shouldn't be a problem, I hope

All I'm getting on the Grand Rapids feed is static, like the squelch needs to be adjusted.

Alrighty, doing some maintenance on the online scanner today. Taking it down for the next few hours at least, putting a new computer in as a server to run the stream. Have most of it built and configured, just need to transfer a hard drive and the wireless card, then do some rearranging in the 'server' room, new shelf. I'll let you all know when it's back up. Lag between live and streamed output is around 90 seconds on the old pentium 3 I'm running it on, and have a Pentium 4 that I'm installing instead. Hope the new one reduces this by a little bit.

New server is in place as of 7pm last night, tested it for a while, and all seems well. Let me know if the volume level needs to be changed, or if you have any difficulty connecting. Also bumped up the squelch a notch as we were getting a bit too much in the way of static.

could use some more volume over...

massive squelch issues tonight over. Like nothing but squelch for the last 10 minutes...

Any idea what channel that the squelch might have been being picked up on? seems to happen pretty infrequently, and wonder which channel is causing the problems.

Also, internet service at home might be hosed as I haven't been able to get on the server in the past 2 hours... hope our basement isn't flooded.

I'll also bump up the volume when I get home.

Server back up... doesn't appear to be an issue with the new PC as other PC's in the house were offline as well. Power cycle modem&router fixed, so will have to keep monitoring this. My guess is router probs, but we'll see.

railroadfan wrote:Any idea what channel that the squelch might have been being picked up on? seems to happen pretty infrequently, and wonder which channel is causing the problems.

w.o looking at the face panel of the radio its hard to say what caused the squelch break. maybe a web cam to monitor the faceplate for troubleshooting purposes?

At least I haven't heard that squelch blarring in a while.
I think I'm going to turn off AAR 53 - 160.905 as it seems most of the talk on that channel is just the drones in the yard giving feedback about their current status. Going to also turn on a couple CN channels to listen to to see what kind of reception we get. Will make these changes Saturday.

railroadfan wrote:At least I haven't heard that squelch blarring in a while.
I think I'm going to turn off AAR 53 - 160.905 as it seems most of the talk on that channel is just the drones in the yard giving feedback about their current status. Going to also turn on a couple CN channels to listen to to see what kind of reception we get. Will make these changes Saturday.

CN DUDE how far away is that???? i think you would have a better shot of adding the Amtrash freq if its not already in there

Had a little bit of downtime today as the electricity went off at home and didn't have a way to turn back on the PC till this afternoon. PC is back on and churning out some CSX waves.

Changed the software on the streaming server from Shoutcast/Winamp to Oddcast/Icecast for encoding and streaming. So far, delay from live went from 90 seconds down to 20 seconds. Will continue to test and see if there's any other buffer settings that can be changed to make sure it stays down around 20.

Got in the car this morning, turned on the scanner, then dawned on me that I left the GR feed scanner locked on the CSX road channel(160.230).... so if it's more quiet than normal today, that's why. I'll correct that around 7pm tonight. Was getting a lot of static from Grand Elk and wanted to hear L326 last night calling out signals, then forgot to set it back to all channels. Oopsie...

btw, delay is still about 20 seconds now, so it's a vast improvement over the older software.

Too bad we can't set a higher squelch setting for some ch's... oh well.