Special notes about feed:
The following paragraph will make more sense after reading the entire post and
description of setup.
There is static on the feed that varies during different times of the day. This is due to some kind of FM interference that fluctuates ( no interference at night, but starting around 9 am in the morning until the evening, the noise gets progressively worse........) Haven't been able to figure this out yet. Any suggestions? It is not due to our recent rains in Southern California, as I was having this problem before the rains.
NOTE: The feed
IS extremely clear (in evenings) ......when the daily fluctuations in interference/noise dissipate and are at their lowest.
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- I will try to keep the feed up and running for as many hours/day as I can. Currently I have an issue with a direct hookup from the scanner to my laptop (see below). I am waiting on an old family computer that I may be able to dedicate to the feed (may be Oct 2010 though), but for now I have a workable, but strange/convoluted set up:
- My antenna is located 50-60 ft from the house and computer, on top of a shed. I cannot run antenna cable to the house for "wifey"/aesthetic reasons
. In fact the scanner has been banned to the shed, and I don't want to use my computer out there. So...........
- I put the scanner in the shed and feed output to a FM transmitter (for MP3 players). The transmitter puts out a good signal up to 70 ft away.
- I run the feed out of the phone jack on my stereo receiver (tuned to the FM transmitter's frequency) and into the mic input on my laptop.
- The signal is pretty good. However, my biggest inconvenience is the FM transmitter is not digital and there is a slow drift off the transmitting frequency. This drift seems to be due to daily temperature changes which must be affecting the tuning mechanism. I am keeping my eye out for a cheap digitally tuned FM transmitter to avoid the frequency drift, but for now I have to go outside and manual re-tune the transmitter every so often to keep a consistently good signal. NOTE: After re-tuning the FM transmitter, the previously mentioned FM interference/noise is still there during the day time hours.
Any suggestions?