Online Radio and TV

Yes – I know the World Cup has been going on for almost a month now….. But we’re up to the third place game today to see whether Uruguay (winners of the first World Cup) or Germany (won it a couple times as West Germany – never since reunification) will be our third place finisher. If I were to bet I would say Germany would be the winner today, but you never know – that’s why they go ahead and play the game! Anyway, online in the US espn3.com has done something interesting. They have brokered deals with many high speed internet providers and if you browse to their site from a provider they have a deal with, you can get live streaming coverage of the FIFA World Cup, or a host of other sports. Coming in August they’ll be showing Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Italian and English Premier League football (fútbol) (soccer) by the looks of it, which I’m looking forward to…. It also looks as though Univision is running the Spanish language coverage of the World Cup Final and Consolation games.

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We had a strange outage here this week, the main page was up, but the interior pages were giving 404 messages. I saw that traffic had dropped off and checked the home page to see if the site was down. When I saw it was fine….. I just assumed that one of our inbound traffic sources had just stopped sending as much traffic and didn’t spend any more time chasing it.

Then last night – while checking broken links on another of my sites (that links here), I found a 404 page on a link that should have worked and that’s when I discovered that permalinks were broken (missing .htaccess). I think one of my plugins may have caused it, but am not certain yet. Anyway, it’s fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience!

Along the lines of broken links. I’ve installed a plugin to check the links on the site to see if they redirect or are broken. So, you may notice a strike through on some links. This is how the plugin treats links it thinks are broken. Now, I have seen a couple situations where the checker thinks a link is broken when it’s not. So, you may want to give the link a try anyway if it’s a media link. (I could see some of those failing even if they really are valid.) That’s all for the moment, more coming soon!

I’ve spent a bit of time making around 200 quick shortcuts for my own use to launch various online radio and video streams. As I was doing so, of course I noticed that many of the links I have here have become outdated. (Which is one of the things I hate about online video/radio… you would think that there would be an advantage to keeping your content at the same place over a long time – much like a radio frequency.) Anyway….. I may make this batch of launchers available here in the future, for the moment though I just wanted to make a note of some of the really useful sources in compiling some of these. Of course, I’ve used much of the content I have here….

Anyway…

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I remember years ago coming across a site that I was really excited about. It was a newspaper directory and listed all of the newspapers that had websites around the world. You could search by country, language, etc. Then of course, there have been the radio and tv directories. I have tried to glean some here of course. But recently I received an email that I just got around to reading with a link to a media directory that covers everything…. newspapers, magazines, video, audio, blogs, etc. I see a limited number of countries so far, but this is a good start at what could be one of the most comprehensive sites of it’s kind. Online media – is a Directory of media: newspapers, magazines, radio, blogs and
television. It deserves to be bookmarked and revisited and I’ll be adding it to the links in the sidebar here.

One of the features I really like with the new GRE PSR-300 scanner that I’ve been testing is the signal strength meter. On the display there is a big S when your receiving a transmission followed by 0-5 bars to indicate signal strength. Why is this such a good thing. Well for starters it makes comparing antennas easier. Frequencies that you’re used to seeing one or two bars on you will be able to compare a second antenna and see if you get 2 or 3 bars or the same 1 or 2 bars of signal strength. I’ve already used this to compare two rubber ducky style stock antennas and concluded they were about the same. Subjective listening comparison is just not quite the same. maybe there’s more static but a louder signal on one or the other. It can be very subjective. Of course, 5 bars isn’t a perfectly well tuned and calibrated way to measure, there can still be subtle differences that aren’t picked up on a 5 bar scale. There is another VERY useful reason that I’m glad this is a feature though.

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A while back I posted about whether or not amateur radio was still relevant and I think it is…. that post has had a fair amount of interest and I thought it would be worthwhile to dig deeper and look at some of the reasons why both amateur radio and shortwave are and should still be relevant today and need to be viable methods of communication for us in coming years. I can see why some may look on this as a “tinfoil hat” article. I really am working not to be paranoid, but realistic.

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I mentioned in the last post that one of the things that I was surprised by was the feel that it wasn’t as durable a plastic cover on the GRE PSR-300 as I recall on the older (80s/90s era) Radio Shack/Uniden handhelds. I can’t tell you how many times the old Uniden has taken a fall from a bookshelf, table, attached to me…. not a crack. We have two small kids in the house so I have a tendency to place things like this out of reach and I have used headphones with the scanner to avoid disturbing others/them disturbing my listening. However…. This earplug attachment has at times had unfortunate falls of about 3 and 1/2 to 4 feet at the most onto a hardwood floor. That has happened countless times to the old uniden without a crack and once to the GRE.

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This is going to be a long series. I am going to be spacing things out a bit and so I’m starting this post on January 1st. It will likely publish on the 30th. I’m going to delve into quite a few aspects of the GRE PSR-300 in greater detail in future posts, but this is going to be a more general writeup.

First let me start by saying wow to scannermaster.com I think I ordered about 1PM on the 28th and the thing was in my hands at 4PM on the 30th of December. UPS certainly had a big hand in that as well as simple geography, but that is impressive. Orders before 3pm ship the same day and they do it (as long as there’s no extra programming needed.)

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Just wanted to post this – we’ve had a tornado warning this evening and after hearing all sorts of interference on the local weather radio from 99.9 Kiss FM (which I wondered if it was because of my receiver)… I noticed that they were repeating the time over and over instead of the usual weather warning and alert information. From another source I’ve found that the NOAA weather transmitter WXL56 at Mount Pisgah (which transmits on 162.400 Mhz) was damaged in the recent winter weather storms. I heard the information while monitoring one of the South Carolina weather radio channels (simulcast with their local weather radar on cable.)

Below the fold is the official statement.

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When I was shopping for the GRE PSR-300 I noticed that a lot of places (including scannermaster.com) offer to program your scanner for you. Some, such as the greamerica.com site offer pre-programming for free for one county (and they sell it at a bit higher price.) Others will offer programming for around the $60 range (for one county). I saw one person on ebay offering to take $25 in exchange for programming a scanner for you (one county I think.) Of course you would have to send the radio off to them and wait for it back. I thought for a brief time about paying for the programming, but decided not to and really it came down to a couple of reasons. Price was definitely one, I really didn’t feel like throwing around an extra $60 I didn’t need to. But there was more…

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