Eblo

Scanners, Recording, and Podcasting, Oh My!

Just today/yesterday, I started messing around with iPodder(.org) and podcasts. I don't have an iPod, but I do have a disc-based MP3 player in my car, so the plan is to get feeds in iPodder, dump them to CD-RW periodically (daily?) and then listen to the casts on the way to/from work. I'm looking for decent podcasts, and am open to suggestions. I'm already on the Dawn and Drew (http://www.dawnanddrew.com/) bandwagon, as well as a few other staples pushed by some of the more successful podcasts.

FWIW, I'd first heard of podcasts only a few days ago, not fully grokking what they were. But today/yesterday, there was an article in one of the local papers about them, and I had to dig further. I find it interesting that Adam Curry, from the MTV way-back machine, is a driving force behind iPodder/podcasting.

Anyway, so my idea is for content for a podcast. I like to listen to radio traffic on scanners - something I've been interested in for a while, but only recently pursued. Police traffic is pretty cool, but I'm also pretty keenly interested in aviation traffic. Since I live close to a fairly busy regional airport (UGN), I'm thinking of setting up an antenna in our attic (I'll see if the old TV antenna will fit up there and it it'll handle the aviation frequencies), patching one of my scanners into a linux box, capturing the audio, time-compressing it to get rid of boring silences, and then publish podcasts that I can grab whenever and that others might be interested in as well (hey - you never know).

I'm not sure about the time-compression side of things. It seems it should be doable if not done already. Ideally, perhaps, I'd swap in a one-second tone for each minute or maybe ten minutes skipped. That way conversations aren't too out of whack - ie someone calling the airport from 10 miles out and then suddenly calling pattern entry. I need to research thsi bit now since I can't sleep.

Another consideration is which frequencies to grab. Initially I'm thinking of keeping it simple to avoid confusion - UGN tower frequency, perhaps local approach/departure frequencies, and the emergency/guard frequency just in case something exciting happens.

We'll see if this goes anywhere.

3:21 A.M.:
Ok, I've done some research, and so far the only software that does what I want (VOX-style recording) is for Windows. It runs under wine, but isn't scriptable, so for now, this would be a very manual process of turning over the recordings. Hmm. Anyway, I'm going to try to get some sleep now. Maybe I'll drop some links in here in the future.