NOTE: We know when feeds are down

[dave]

Hi all-

Something many listeners may not be aware of - we operate a monitoring system that lets us know when feeds are down.  The feed provider for the down feed is also notified once a feed has been down for at least 20 minutes. 

So...sending in messages about down feeds is a bit counterproductive, for all of us.  We already know and are likely doing things to bring the feed back online.  In some cases it is not possible to do that in a timely fashion due to hardware failures, lightning strikes, and a myriad of other issues which we frequently have no or little control over.

So in order to reduce the workload here - please don't email about down feeds.  Or if you do, expect that a response to you may take a while.

Thanks,
Dave

[gonzalu]

Hi Dave,

Sometimes it is frustrating for us not to know what is going on. For example, today, for the last 4 hours I have been trying to listen to ANY of the JFK frequencies with no success. Looking here for info brings up nothing as if they were operational. The website says they are up. I have tried from my app on iPhone, from PC from Mac and both at work and at home still nothing.

Would you consider a status board of sorts that we can look at to see what the issues are at a glance? Telling us that you know and are aware is great and I am sure you have a vested interest, yet we still really don;t know what exactly is going on at any particular moment.

Here is an example of what I  mean:

http://status.smugmug.com/

they use http://www.stashboard.org/ which will probably not work for your system but it is an idea. Twitter is terrifc and I do monitor your feed but there are no reports of issues with JFK so I am in the dark and my iPhone app is down which I rely on when I am too far for my own scanner.

Thanks for your service and support

[dave]

Thanks for the suggestion.

We do our best to disseminate information on both Twitter and the LiveATC Feed Stauts Forum  when an issue is known.  This just happened this morning, so I think the information was broadcast as quickly as possible...when audio disappears it is harder to detect quickly (as compared to a feed going down).  While JFK is a major feed and I certainly am the last person in the world who likes downtime at all, I don't think it is ever so urgent as to require absolute real-time status updates.

I think the uptime on the major feeds speaks for itself and there has been very little downtime to speak of on any of them, except for planned maintenance.  I prefer that over a system that assumes there will always be downtime.