Radio scanning is a great hobby. It keeps you in the know about what’s going on around you, without you having to put yourself in any kind of danger. With a scanner, you can know about fire/rescue incidents, police searches or dangerous crimes that may be happening nearby, and keep abreast of changing weather conditions. Listening to planes take off and land at a nearby airport is another possibility, for those with aviation interests.
Of course, for many people, the expense of a scanner, or the means to program it for proper use, may not be possible. So I provide two different scanner feeds through two different websites that accept them as user-provided content.These feeds can be listened to through the web, and also through a variety of smartphone apps and other internet radio players.
The Feeds
The first, and easily more popular of the two, is my feed of NOAA Weather Radio KHB-36. This is the NOAA Weather Radio station that broadcasts from Manassas, VA, and whose broadcast covers the greater Washington Metropolitan area. This feed regularly receives a large amount of listeners during severe weather events. Click here to listen to this feed (link will open a new window or tab). Thanks to Weather Underground for providing the hosting platform for this feed.
The second feed is of the Unified Communications (Unicom) frequency assigned to Leesburg Executive Airport, which is about 1 mile south of where I live. My residence is directly within the flight path of the airport, so I use it myself to know when planes are coming in to land or taking off. With this airport being Virginia’s second busiest general aviation airport, it can actually be fairly busy at times, as business executives fly into the airport for their nearby companies. There are also a number of aviation schools that use this airport, so many times you’ll hear repeated takeoff and landing calls by students. Click here to listen to this feed (link will open a new window or tab). Thanks to Broadcastify for providing the hosting platform for this feed.
So how do I provide these feeds?
I have two different scanners – an old Sony Wavehawk and a newer Uniden BC250D – each programmed to the specific frequency for their transmissions. They feed into a computer – one into the computer’s own sound card, the other into a USB sound card that I added – that is running two different encoding programs. These programs take the audio from the scanners and turn it into an MP3 stream that can be played by a variety of different software players and mobile apps.
The scanners, computer, and all of my internet connection hardware (router and modem) are all on a UPS system that can provide up to 1 hour of running time if the power should go out for that long. Of course, past experience has shown that Verizon’s FiOS hardware for my condo building will probably run out of its own battery power first, so it’s more of a failsafe to make sure that everything is still running properly when power is restored (power failures where I live are rare, but when they do happen, they aren’t usually for very long periods of time).
Comments? Questions?
Please feel free to leave comments or ask any questions you may have about my feeds below.
By the way… just wanted to note that at the peak of tonight’s storms, over 160 people were listening to the NOAA Weather Radio feed! The next closest feed at the time was in Illinois, with 60 people listening to it.
Thanks for making the Manassas weather feed available. On the afternoon of teh 29th I was the 47th listener.
Just a note… lost power early this morning, causing my internet connection to drop. The feeds will return this afternoon when I return home, sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 pm EST.