CLT Feed as partial replacement for GSO

[MIAMIATC]

I was listening to the CLT Feed this afternoon and heard Delta 75 checking in w/ATL ARTCC at FL350. Are there now some high level Freq's. being scanned from the feed ?? Secondly maybe the operator at CLT can throw in some ATL ARTCC center frequencies such as 123.725/125.625/124.375/120.425 since those are the high level frequencies over that area going into ATL. That would be an awesome feed listening to both CLT ARR/DEP AND ATL ARR/DEP.

[PHL Approach]

I was trying to listening one day so I could take note of operations and noticed center phraseology. DJ is so right on about how it just overcrowds feeds, you can't figure out what the hell is going on. If he adds all those freqs, I'm sure the feed will be up to or past 20 freqs. Way too much.

[MIAMIATC]

Again there was a post or reply that was mentioned that the feeds should alternate day to day from Class B/C/or D op's. w/ARTCC. The Clt feed if you listen does not seem to be busy at all there is barely and controller/pilot conversations and the reception seems weak anyway. I really dislike that because there are some people that seem to be fixated on just airport transmissions that the rest of us who like to listen to ARTCC centers are alienated. I may be very sarcastis in saying this or sound like I am making accusatory statements by mentioning that some forum members and I am witholding names seem to be more active in the forum or hold higher positions in the forum can dictate what feeds go on and when and treat other people who try to befriend them they seem to be above everything else because they have more knowledge or otherwise think they are worth more. Seems to me that certain people here look down upon others because maybe they do not know the similar amount of knowledge or more that they do that they are ignored. There are people here who would genuinely like to meet up with fellow monitoring buddies and exchange info without holding back the info and having those people researc and pine for the info they need. As per me if I had the tech comp knowledge i would not hold back what i have to share. I am sure there are cliques here that spread the word that oh this person asks too much of people to help them but we dont like him/her so they spread the word/9maybe i am wrong but this is how i see this board as of late). We are all the same people here so we should at least share info if we have it w/out any reservation and at least try to treat everybody w/respect. Majority may ruke here when it comes to what type of feeds to run and how but there are other people here that would like to listen to other things too. Lets get the balance right gentlemen and realize that if you dictate/control what is heard than we are loiving in a socialist state on this board and that there are going to be folks leaving this board. Lets just keep the forum and feeds going but realize that there are others here that are into thei hobby as a hobby and not a way to advance their ego's.

[MIAMIATC]

oh and i am sure there will be certain people that will read this and think that something should be said about me and i should be reprimeanded by being kicked off the board, if that happens then this board and people who run it have serious issues to deal with in their head. If any one needs charts or maps and i cant either scan them or upload them in e-mails to you ill kindly make copies and mail them out to you via snail mail. I am more than willing and able to help those that are here and I would not hesitate to do so. I trat everybody here the same and equally and not descriminate because i my or may not have a plane or may or may not be going to school involving aviation. Soime listen just for enjoyment in their lives and not a a life.

[sean]

Let me take a stab at this from my perspective.  

Although I don't post very much, it's only because I'm busy "behind-the-scenes" as it were trying to find/acquire new sites for feeds.  Trust me - it isn't easy.  Though I can completely understand your disappointment that there aren't more Centers being fed, I can tell you without any doubt that it isn't because thats not what the community is interested in.  

And it is just that, a community.

I think one of the reasons that more centers aren't being fed is due in part to the way the transmitters are placed.  Many people that are willing to feed know that they are capable of sending XYZ airport because it's right down the street.  Very few people know that the ZYX remote communications outlet is right down the street, and so they don't write in.  If more people knew, perhaps we would be better able to recruit ARTCC feeders.

I have a fairly accurate list of all the ARTCC RCAGs, but don't have the resources right now to prune it down and publish it somehow.  What would be great would be to generate a Google Earth interface that we could direct potential feeders to.  Is that something you might be interested in helping with?

With regard to cliques and the witholding of technical information, I'm sorry that it seems that way.  Please be more specific about those instances, either here or in a private message to me, and I'll work to try and alleviate that.  For technical issues of any type I encourage people to either e-mail me directly, or send an e-mail to the site technical address:  tech@liveatc.net

Concerning quality of sites, I can address this directly.  So much of what happens "in the back room" doesn't get seen, and that probably leads to some of this uncertainty.  There is always a lot of interest in becoming a potential feed site, but not every one of those interested sites ends up making it to the front page.  The feeds are screened first to insure that they are of the highest quality that LiveATC folks have come to expect.  

Your views are important, and with the flurry of activity and interest of late, its hard to keep a strict balance on everything.  Of course many of us have careers and families, and it's always difficult to juggle them all.  My views are, of course, my own, and I don't speak for Dave.  Nonetheless, if there's something really bugging you, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to work through it for you.

NYARTCCFAN, and others - What are the top 3 or 4 things you'd like to see changed/improved?

Sean

[dave]

NYARTCC-

I don't know where you get the ideas you have about the way things are run here and how feeds are selected.  This is an open community and all are encouraged to contribute by finding new feeds to feature.  The reason we have many airports as opposed to en route facilities is exactly what Sean mentioned - most people don't know where the transmitters are.  There is a link on the site to the excellent MilAir Comms web site, which has a map of all U.S. Centers and the towns where transmitters are located.  It is reasonably accurate - the locations don't change that often.

The only criterion we try to stick to is that new, prospective feeds have good receive quality.  We also try to generally avoid feeds that carry one-sided transmissions.  In our experience, a very limited number of people enjoy listening to just airplanes or just controllers.  If there is a good reason to carry one of those, however, I am more than happy to do it.

There is a lot that goes on here that you don't see.  We also avoid posting things like "xxxx feed is coming" because after trying that for a while all I have found is that people send emails every 5 minutes asking when xxxx is going to be live.   Sometimes feeds come up easily, sometimes they don't.  We have made it about as technically simple as it can be for feeders to being feeds online.  There is still an amount of technical skill, albeit small, that is required for someone to run a feed.  It is the nature of the beast, and sometimes feeders opt to not run a feed they thought they would be able to run.

I don't understand why you feel so alienated.  Please drop a line and let us know why.  If there is one particular person or group of people who are making you feel that way, I'd like to know about it.  That's not the kind of community we want this to be.

Thanks,
Dave

[MIAMIATC]

No disrespect to you Dave in any way at all. I must thank Matt(INDY FEED), Jetscan1(DJ), and JohnathanTCU from Canada. They have generously hepled w/my requests and gave me more info that I have asked for in the past and present as well as PIT(for the life of me I cant remember his name again). But some here either look down upon others or refuse to share info that they have because they think they are all that and then some. Im so glad I didn't use my caps on my rant(detrimental mistake that really interupted the boards existence). Remember we are on computors not in real life. I would invite anyone to my area or my home for that matter to get together to trade secrests and paperwork and go spotting anytime without any reservations whatsover because I dont belong to a certain circle of people. Thats all from me on this rant.

[Kalpazan]

...

NYARTCCFAN, and others - What are the top 3 or 4 things you'd like to see changed/improved?

Sean

I would personally be very happy to see distribution server in Europe. I beleive there are many listeners here that does not have that excellent connection to U.S. I do not know if it is possible to link two Icecast servers each other but it would certainly help I think  

[dave]

...

NYARTCCFAN, and others - What are the top 3 or 4 things you'd like to see changed/improved?

Sean

I would personally be very happy to see distribution server in Europe. I beleive there are many listeners here that does not have that excellent connection to U.S. I do not know if it is possible to link two Icecast servers each other but it would certainly help I think  

I have a lot of experience in this area.  The listening servers, at least one of which is in The Netherlands, are scattered around the globe and "fed" by a load blaancer.  Most of them are in the U.S., where most of the listeners are.  There is a heavy listener contingent from western Europe, however.

Like feeds, many of the listener servers are provided by volunteers.  For that reason, it is hard to dedicate one to only European listeners.  We try to keep the bandwidth utilization on each server as low as possible.

All that being said, there is a low-level effort underway to customize the load balancer to pay attention to GeoIP data and direct listeners to a server on the right continent.  This will likely take a long time to deploy, and is not a high priority right now.

But your request is heard.

Dave

P.S. I should also point out that a server that one might think is "network closer" is not always "network closer."

[Kalpazan]

One question Dave...

Is it possible to use the server that you mentioned in Netherlands for feeding also ? Those ~10% packet loss I am getting to liveatc.net lately is so bad   I aim for 24/7 uptime but it currently disconnects every few minutes; used to be quite stable few weeks ago though...

[dave]

One question Dave...

Is it possible to use the server that you mentioned in Netherlands for feeding also ? Those ~10% packet loss I am getting to liveatc.net lately is so bad   I aim for 24/7 uptime but it currently disconnects every few minutes; used to be quite stable few weeks ago though...

Due to the way replication works in this setup, this is not currently possible.

One thing I *can* do is increase the timeout on feeder connections.  I will do that and we can see if that has a positive effect.

Dave