Recently in Scanner Stream Category

Now that I have converted over to the new scanner and control software, I am recording as MP3 all of the communications that come across the air. What I am working on at the moment is to present a history of the day's dispatches in audio format on the web site each day. Listen to the sample below, a dispatch for our station tonight for an accident on the US 30 Bypass (requires Flash).



I am still working on the way to get the audio to the server so bear with me. I hope to have it up sometime over the Labor Day Holiday weekend. Please leave comments and suggestions!

In case you have not noticed, I have added a few new selections to the scanner stream. The most evident one is Berks County and Reading, PA fire/EMS dispatch.With the new scanner on the stream, a Bearcat BCT15, sensitivity is greatly improved. I am working on a new antenna system that will hopefully also add Delaware County fire/EMS, as well as Montgomery County.

I am also using a new piece of software to control this scanner called bcTool. I am considering capturing dispatch and large fire/EMS event audio which you can then download from the web site for offline listening. bcTool is also working on an audio server component which I may be testing in the future, which will allow control of the scanner from the web as well.

Stay tuned and stay safe!

Of interest if you are a first responder in Chester County, PA: the 800-MHz radio system is currently experiencing problems (read: broken). While dispatches are still coming through on your VHF pagers (setting A/B/D) and can be monitored on 160.185 MHz, you will not hear response/command communications on the Central/East (159.600 MHz) or West (159.735 MHz) simulcast or on setting "C" on your Minitor pagers.

Fire response and command communications have been temporarily relocated to the Inter-Ops frequencies, which use conventional, rather than trunked repeaters, for your appropriate area:

• 866.5125 MHz - INTEROPS1
• 867.0125 MHz - INTEROPS2
• 867.5125 MHz - INTEROPS3
• 868.0125 MHz - INTEROPS4

I have opened these frequencies to the online scanner stream. Country radio has been running some tests on the system over the past few minutes so the outage will hopefully be a brief one.

Update: Chester County Radio is back in service at 1055.

I will be taking down the scanner stream to do some LAN wiring. It should not be down for more than 15-30 minutes at a time (hopefully only one time).

The live scanner stream is off-line, courtesy of a Comcrash outage after last night's heavy thunderstorms. As soon as we get service restored, the stream will be back online.

Update: the stream is back on-line!

Sorry for the 30 minute interruption this afternoon - I was configuring a wireless router for our fire station and it did not go as quickly as planned. Good news is that we will be entering the 21st Century with wireless access at the station!

I am rearranging the home network so there will be potentially one or more network interruptions today and tomorrow. I need to do this to improve other things that run here, as well as get the laser printer properly networked once and for all.

I finally got the time to put the scanner status and listen link page back on-line. Now, you can simply click on the Live Scanner Stream link in the right column and go directly to the stream. For ease of bookmarks, http://jimmetzger.net/radio/ goes there as well!

Special note to webmasters of Fire/EMS/Police and Radio Buff web sites: If you would like to link to the stream, please go to Live Scanner Stream page and see the code to include at the bottom of that page! If you already link to the stream, please make sure that you use the code shown there. Thanks!

I am working to get the live audio stream status working on the web page. As I mentioned earlier, the way to listen to the stream is by doing a search on Shoutcast. I am so used to using Shoutcast, I never thought to explain further how to actually get the stream to work (my apologies). When the above link is clicked, you will see a line that has the following in it: [Scanner Fire EMS Radio] Chester Co, PA USA Live Scanner Radio. To the left of the line, there is a yellow button marked Tune In.

Clicking this button will cause your default audio player to open and play the stream (you may have to click OK to do it, depending upon your settings). My stream player of choice is WinAmp - the free version works just fine. The stream plays fine in WinAmp, Windows Media Player, Real Player and iTunes, just to name a few. If you have problems, leave me a comment on this post and I will help you out any way that I can. Good listening!

I am in the process of changing the way you can easily get to the live scanner stream. As a part of this, I need to find out what web sites are currently linking to the stream. Obviously, Google is identifying a lot of them, but I would appreciate it if you are the webmaster of a site that links to it or if you know a web site that does, please leave a comment on this post, with your name, email address, and the URL(s) where the link is at!

Thanks in advance for your help!