Project - W4ABP Repeater Streaming Live Feed

After trading vehicles and not being able to talk or listen to the W4ABP repeater, I had the idea of trying to stream the audio received from a scanner online so I could still listen.  I did some research and landed on the Broadcastify service.  It is free to signup as a feed provider. You just have to provide some information about your feed.  I had an old Radioshack Pro-82 laying around and an old Dell Optiplex small form factor PC.  I connected the headphone jack to the line in on the PC and installed the RadioFeed application provided by Broadcastify.  Once I set it up and adjusted the levels, I waited for traffic on the  repeater.  Listening to the stream I made some adjustments of the levels and used the notch filters to reduce some hum and other artifacts from the scanner.

This setup worked pretty well so I embedded the feed web player on our club website.  People have started to use the feed while they are at work or generally away from a radio.  In fact, Bridgecom has used the feed to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues with the club repeater.

The biggest problems were caused by the scanner and PC being located in my ham shack.  When I would transmit on VHF, it would overload the RX of the scanner and distort the audio on the feed. If I worked 40m, it would cause issues with the soundcard and the PC would need to be rebooted.

I came up with another solution. Since I help maintain the repeater and we had an internet connection at the site, I decided to take the live feed PC there.  This enabled me to take the scanner completely out of the equation and plug the external speaker output into the line in of the PC.  The stream would then be a true representation of exactly what the RX of the repeater was hearing.  I have set the PC to boot up on it's own after a power failure, auto login, and auto connect the stream. I have TeamViewer  remote control software on it so I can update, manipulate, and troubleshoot as long as the PC is online.

So far this setup is working great.  I'm working on using a PC, SDR dongles, and DSDPlus to listen to my county's DMR MotoTRBO system and might push some of the talk groups to another Broadcastify feed.

You can listen to the stream from LARC's W4ABP repeater on our website here: https://www.lanierlandarc.org/p/repeaters.html

on Broadcastify's website here: https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31378

or on the Broadcastify or other scanner feed apps on smartphones.



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