As I’ve been getting more interested in the operations of the rail line that runs through where I’m living now, I’ve starting using my ham rig to listen to BNSF radio activity. For fun, I started writing down when I heard the detector go off, to get an idea of what the traffic patterns are. I quickly realized that doing this by hand wasn’t a very good way to find patterns. Since the trains are operating 24 hours a day, and I can only be near the radio for a small portion of them, there would obviously be some holes in the data.
Then I had an idea - why not connect the computer to my ham rig and have it record the information for me? And that’s exactly what I did. I found some software that’ll record a sound file every time it hears activity on the scanner. Since the defect detector (almost) always says the same thing, I can just look at the size of the recorded file (longer bits of recorded sound have a larger file size) and determine how many of the recordings are from the defect detector, and therefore, how many trains have passed. I wrote a script that does just that last night, and, after a few tweaks, it’s batting 1000, picking up all 12 of the recordings that were from the detector overnight.
Taking this a step further, I’ve figured out it would be pretty easy to set this up so it would report train activity to my web site, where I could put together stats (in near real time), such as trains in the last hour, trains in the last day, shortest time between two trains, most active hour, most active day of the week, etc. I don’t know if anyone else would be interested in these data, but I certainly would.
Is it okay to do this? Anyone could sit on public property and write down more detailed information on the train activity, however, since this is listening to the BNSF radio broadcast, I’m not entirely sure if it would be okay to publish the data derived from it. I suppose I ought to send an email to BNSF, but it can’t hurt to see
Considering the number of web-based railroad radio feeds, that shouldn’t be a problem at all.
The Communications Act of 1934 only forbids use of received radio transmissions (of which you are not directly a party) for personal gain. Unless you’re charging for access to your website, should be no problem.
IMHO, I’d skip contacting anybody - odds are they’ll tell you no…
That sounds about right. I thought I had heard something about transmissions and personal gains, but, I couldn’t remember if that only applied to when I was broadcasting/recieving with other hams or with any frequencies.
I’ll work on this some more tonight, and, hopefully we’ll have a “live feed” of train activity on the Red Rock Sub in Norman, OK online by tomorrow.
Along a similar line, now that I have a DSL line and I can (mostly) see a major rail line from my front window, I was contemplating a web cam…any body know a resource for how to go about such a thing?
Google web cams - you should see at least a few entries for the cameras themselves.
The biggest catch is that you need a server to handle and distribute the video, and you have to decide how often you’re going to update the image. If you want to do a totally live feed, you can forget about surfing - all of your DSL bandwidth will be taken up by the video. You’ll also need a way to present a consistant address for people to hit - there are ways to do that. Your DSL is probably what’s called “DHCP.” Your Internet address may be different tomorrow…
Try contacting one of the train cam admins offline to see if they can/will offer you any advice. Or for that matter, any webcam admin.
If you can somehow roll all that into one app that can be adjusted for people’s local situation in terms of audio, I think you might have a marketable little shareware program there. Dave http://www.dpdproductions.com - Featuring the TrainTenna Railroad Radio Antennas -
Unfortunately this is taking me longer than I thought it would. It turns out that it’s a bit more difficult than I thought it would be… I will post a link when I get it worked out, but, it might be a while
Alright, the system is still in the “beta” stage, but, it might be useful/interesting to a few of you. It takes about 2 minutes for the defect detector to be recorded until it makes it online. Some of the recordings are false alarms - the probability is listed for unverified reports.
