Weekend - Part 1

Just had a look at the local weather radar... it appears that it's going to get a little wet around here soon. Of course it'll rain today, since I was finally able to get the Big Ford cleaned up halfway decent (see previous post). Oh well. Beats another dump of the white stuff, plus it's 60 degrees outside right now which is a major bonus for me (take a look at This Post if you want to know why). I'll take warm & wet over cold & whatever any day.

My friend Tim is taking a couple of online courses via the ever-popular University of Phoenix. He was explaining to me the other day about the way it's set up sort of like a Usenet News Group, where the instructor gives... er, well, instructions I suppose, and students posts their messages & assignments back to the board. The students in his class sometimes work as a group or team, and each student's work gets critiqued by the others. Assignments are graded along the way, with a successful tally resulting in receiving the passing credits. I hope I remembered most of that correctly. Tim says that it takes a lot of screen time to keep up. He's getting ready to finish up soon so I'm betting he's psyched. Anyone else out there doing the online education thing and want to comment? Likes, dislikes, costs, worth it or not, would you do it again, etc.?

*Hint*
~You can skip this next section if you're not a Scanning Enthusiast~

Well, I've been working slowly (but steadily) on filling in my WCDPS 800Mhz/System-152 P96Comm TalkGroup and Radio ID lists. I've logged 118 TG's and 1348 Radio ID's total so far, with quite a few of those identified and confirmed. For those of you using P96Comm and who listen to WCDPS, updated copies of my P96Comm files along with a Win96 programming file, are available as downloadable Zip files from the Scanner Page on GMANS.net. Also, I've been tinkering with the live audio feed server for the WCDPS scanner traffic, trying to make it more efficient and able to host an additional number of clients (it's popular!), so those of you using it may find it down for maintenance here and there for short periods. If you repeatedly can't connect, I'm most likely working on it, so check back a little later. If for any reason it has to be down for an extended period of time, I'll post a notice on the Scanner Page to let you know. Obviously, the new WCDPS 800Mhz system is my main focus these days, being one of the few APCO-25 digital trunked public service systems in the area, and since it's such a major departure away from the older VHF/UHF conventional radio systems. Both my Pro-96 and Pro-2096 are working great and I'm definitely happy with their performance. The 2096 is what you're listening to on the live feed, pumping its audio into the server. As I noted on the Scanner Page, for those of you listening to the live feed, drop a line to the NKNOC Labs to let me know what you think. This project was more of an experiment than an idea for a permanent offering, and does tie up some borrowed hardware here in the NOC. If I hear from enough of you that like it, I most likely will set up some dedicated NOC equipment for a permanent connection out to the 'Net. So send that email!

Time to go and fix some dinner (never did understand that.... is dinner broken..??), so that will bring this post to its close.

See you next time, and don't be bashful.... post a comment!

GMan