Boston Logan Airport Public Safety and Operations

Information regarding the many available scanner feeds, to include updates, changes, scheduled downtime, special broadcasts, your suggestions, etc.
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Pacmannion
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Joined: 01 Jul 2017 20:01
Location: Lynn, MA
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Boston Logan Airport Public Safety and Operations

Post by Pacmannion »

I've setup a feed of Boston Logan's public safety (MSP Troop F and Massport Fire) and operations on OpenMHz.

It is by no means perfect, since it's a bit of a kludge using 3 RTL-SDR dongles and the trunk-recorder software. The antennas currently are just 3 mag whip antennas that come with the dongles, which is decent, but obviously they're not tuned for 800MHz. I'm getting a lot of 0 second recordings which means the data is corrupted, and occasional garbled recordings. It doesn't help that I'm also on the fringe of the receiving area up here in Lynn.

I plan to work out the bugs over the coming weeks but it will take some time. For now consider my feed to be in a beta status.

Anyways, it's available here:

https://openmhz.com/system/bosops
Patrick W1PAC
Lynn, MA
RadioShack Pro-668 - Yaesu VX-6R - Anytone AT-D868UV - Yaesu FT-900
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n1zyy
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Joined: 29 May 2017 20:56
Location: Lowell, MA

Re: Boston Logan Airport Public Safety and Operations

Post by n1zyy »

Neat!

I've wanted something like this for a while now. The SDRs are capable of several MHz of bandwidth at once; I always wanted something that would let me monitor a bunch of it off one SDR. Looks like it does conventional as well! All of the main Boston PD channels are within about a half MHz of spectrum, and 470-473 and 482-485 would be very fruitful as well.

How do you find CPU load? Think this could run on a Raspberry Pi or does it need a "real" computer?
Matt, N1ZYY ★ Lowell, MA
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Pacmannion
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Re: Boston Logan Airport Public Safety and Operations

Post by Pacmannion »

n1zyy wrote: 05 Mar 2019 21:25 Neat!

I've wanted something like this for a while now. The SDRs are capable of several MHz of bandwidth at once; I always wanted something that would let me monitor a bunch of it off one SDR. Looks like it does conventional as well! All of the main Boston PD channels are within about a half MHz of spectrum, and 470-473 and 482-485 would be very fruitful as well.

How do you find CPU load? Think this could run on a Raspberry Pi or does it need a "real" computer?
Sorry for the delayed reply, I was away in Atlantic City for work training. I just ran a top command, and it's averaging around 37-38% of the CPU, which is a Intel Pentium G3220T running on a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny.

Another ham I know is active in the project and he said although it can be done with a Pi, it's better to use a real computer. The ThinkCentre M73 I'm using is pretty small with it's dimensions being 7.2" x 7.16" x 2.5". It's sitting on top of the massive other Lenovo ThinkCentre I have.

If you are going to use a Pi, it is recommended to use a Pi 3 or newer because anything else most likely won't be able to handle the load.

Thankfully, the M73 one of two was just sitting around from a HTPC project my sister did that didn't really pan out.

As for SDR bandwidth, depending on the bandwidth being used to record, a better processor is needed because to quote this page:
When a single SDR is used, each of the Recorders gets fed all of the sampled signal. Each Recorder needs to cut down the multi-megasamples per second into a small 12.5Khz sliver.
Patrick W1PAC
Lynn, MA
RadioShack Pro-668 - Yaesu VX-6R - Anytone AT-D868UV - Yaesu FT-900
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Pacmannion
Posts: 40
Joined: 01 Jul 2017 20:01
Location: Lynn, MA
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Re: Boston Logan Airport Public Safety and Operations

Post by Pacmannion »

So I've taken the feed offline, it's been having connectivity issues since I was using a Wi-Fi dongle for the connection to the internet and it seems to drop every few days.

On top of that, a lot of the recordings wouldn't play properly and I have no idea how to fix that at the moment, maybe, someday it will come back online, but for now it's on hiatus.
Patrick W1PAC
Lynn, MA
RadioShack Pro-668 - Yaesu VX-6R - Anytone AT-D868UV - Yaesu FT-900
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