BWI feed

[rpd]

What happened to the formerly excellent BWI feed?

[Dr Bob]

Sounds like there are several channels slected in the scanner that are either very noisy or irrelevant (?music?).
It used to be great....now it's just difficult to listen to.

[Dr Bob]

Actually I have been listening to it this afternoon.....sounds perfect now....must've been fixed!

BTW, what's with  the female controller working clearance delivery? She's having too much fun.

[MIAMIATC]

Listening this Morning to the feed and there is definete music interference on the feed. It isnt even as clear as it used to be .

[iskyfly]

I have noticed the same thing. Started about 2 weeks ago. It is not as noticeable during high traffic times because (this is my theory) the scanner does not have a chance to go to the "music" channel. It is very annoying and almost useless to listen to at night. At night when there long periods of no communications the scanner switches to the "music" channel and it sounds like the squelch is set right on cusp such that the audio goes between nothing and the music every second or so. Very very annoying.

Do the powers that be have no contact information with the feeder?

[BWI Tower Feed Owner]

Hi All, I'm the feed operator for the BWI feed.

Sorry wasn't aware of the problem to this degree, I'll try to explain what the cause is and what I am doing to resolve it.

I'm an Amateur radio operator that uses 145.540MHZ to comumicate on the Amateur Radio Freq. My primary scanner appears to have very little rejection and was causing an issue with the feed when I was operating on the 2 meter "HAM" band.  I was aware of this problem and I thought the easiest solution was to go to my backup scanner, which appeard to solve the above problem but  caused the other issues mentioned in the thread. Although I have no idea where the "music" is  or was coming from, I haven't heard it.
Until this issue is resolved, at times you may hear some amateur radio communications that are bleeding into the scanner.  I have not been able to determine if this is just affecting one of the scanner freqs or my entire bank of frequencies.
So now it's time for Plan 3. I have replaced the backup scanner with my Primary scanner as of this morning, The stream should be back to normal at this point.  I still need to address the issue of the "HAM" band interfering with the scanner.  Whcih was my original problem. Since I have no more scanners to test with I will have to look now at antenna placement, possibly trying to seperate the antennas (2 meter ham antenna and the scanner antenna) as much as possible while monitoring the scanner freqs to see if I see a pattern on the freq that may be getting the "bleedover"

[rpd]

Thanks for doing whatever you did k3bay.  The feed seems to be back to its excellent self again.

[dave]

Sounds like fundamental overload.  Even at low 2m power output levels, you are likely to have this issue with virtually any scanner colocated with the 2m transmitter.  Only viable solution would be a 2m notch filter (possibly expensive).

-dave

[Dr Bob]

K3bay:

What ever you're doing....sounds pretty good right now....and THANKS for doing this for all of us. You should know that foulks appreciates your efforts.

[Olivia]

Hi k3bay -
  Thanks for your work getting the feed back to normal.  BWI is one of my favorites. 

[BWI Tower Feed Owner]

Glad things are back to normal, I found one frequency that for whatever reason seemed to be causing my initial problem. I'm not sure if it is a harmonic freq to 145.540mhz or not, will have to get the caculator out and see. Anyway enjoy the feed!