stark

12 websites you should know about for Canton / Stark County, Ohio

Thursday, April 9th, 2009
by W8JKC

Here are 12 websites you should know about and bookmark for Canton City and Stark County, Ohio.
This list appears in random, non-specific order.

• Stark County Convention and Visitors Bureau – Visit Canton Stark
• Pro Football Hall of Fame and Festival – HOF and HOF Fest
• Stark County Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) – WD8AYE
• Canton Amateur Radio Club (CARC) – W8AL
• Quad County REACT – QCR
• ScanAmerica.Us – Stark County
• Akron / Canton Airport – CAK
• 19 Action News – WOIO
• Stark County WeatherSCW
• Canton Repository – CantonRep
• Stark County Government – Stark
• Canton City – Canton
  

To get your website included in the next list, please comment below with a link or email me justin@helin_w8jkc.com
Note: Your comment may not appear when you submit it due to spam filters, but I will still be able to see it and approve it. Please do not submit it more than once. To be considered, site must have content relevant to the Canton or Stark County area.

Top 10 Twitter users to follow for Canton and Stark County Ohio

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
by W8JKC

Here is my list of Top 10 twitter users to follow for Canton and Stark County Ohio.

10. StarkScanner09 – Updates on major Police and Fire events in the county.
9. W8AL – Canton Amateur Radio Club, Amateur Radio news and events.
8. feedline – Canton Amateur Radio Club Newsletter, for new issues and news.
7. CAKairport – Canton Akron Regional Airport.
6. CantonStarkCVB – Convention and Visitor Bureau
5. CantonConcerts – Local Concert news and info.
4. 19ActionNews – North-East Ohio News Stories and articles.
3. fox8news – North-East Ohio News Stories and articles.
2. CantonTraffic – Local Traffic News and information.
1. CantonRepdotCom – Local News Stories and articles.

Didn\’t make the cut, follow me on twitter and you will get followed /considered for the next list.
Feel free to comment, or you can email justin@helin_w8jkc.com

Revised 1 times. Last Revision on April 9 at 0955hrs.

Stark County Trunked Radio System

Monday, February 23rd, 2009
by W8JKC

Recently, I have been monitoring the Stark County/Canton City 800Mhz Motorola Trunked Radio System.

This system id\’s itself as 8E0A. While information about talkgroups and such can be found on radioreference.com [LINK], some talkgroups are appearing on my system that are not listed.

I have found and am using 2 programs to decode the control channel, and find out the use of these new talkgroups. The first program is called Trunk88 and is DOS based. The second program is called Universal Trunker and while the version that I am using is based on DOS, there is a Win32 version available.

Both of these programs will display which Talkgroup, and Radio ID is on each of the trunking systems channels at the current time, which radios affiliate to which talkgroups, and other information that is sent over the control channel.

So far I have found about 10-15 different talkgroups that are not listed, and are being used.

Below is a list which includes these talkgroups and how many times it has been logged, and at what time it was logged.

Note: These talkgroups were monitored on the CROMER site, on 855.0375 Mhz.

TG ID —–# Hits ——First Logged ——- Last Logged
272               18                  Feb 21st                      Feb 21st
1024             13                  Feb 21st                      Feb 23rd
2096             1                    Feb 21st                       Feb 21st
2128              1                    Feb 20th                     Feb 21st
16576           1                    Feb 21st                      Feb 21st
16704           1                    Feb 20th                      Feb 21st
16736           1                     Feb 20th                      Feb 21st
17216            1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 21st
19376            1                    Feb 23rd                       Feb 23rd
41072            1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 23rd
41136             1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 21st
41168             1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 23rd
41200            1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 23rd
41264             1                    Feb 20th                       Feb 20th
41392             1                    Feb 23rd                       Feb 23rd
41520            4                     Feb 23rd                      Feb 23rd
41904            1                     Feb 20th                      Feb 23rd
41936            26                   Feb 20th                     Feb 23rd
42128            1                      Feb 20th                     Feb 23rd
65536            23                   Feb 21st                      Feb 23rd

These programs also require that you modify a scanner to get the baseband audio signal from the chip, before the filters that are to limit the audio for the humal aural range of sound.

All of these new talkgroups can be listened to on ScanAmerica.us [LINK], both Stark County feeds are provided by me.

If you happen to monitor this system yourself, and find anything out about these talkgroups, please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at 8E0A@helin_w8jkc.com.

Even something as simple as \”I heard 144 say that the intersection of 12th St and Market Ave. needs to be…\”, anything that may help to identify these talkgroups.

Server Upgrade

Thursday, December 4th, 2008
by W8JKC

This past thanksgiving weekend I upgraded my primary server.

I backed up about 19 GB of data, including websites, configurations, and other important data. That took about 7 hours. After that was complete I DBAN\’ed the hardrives and proceeded to boot from a CentOS 5 netinstall disk. This took about 1 hour to download and install all the packages and format the harddrives.

Here are the details of this server:

RAM: 380 MB, soon to be upgrade to about 1GB.
CPU: Intel Pentium 3 (667Mhz)
Graphics Card: ATI Rage 3 128 RF/SG AGP

Main HD: 10GB Fujitsu MPF3102AT
Second HD: 80GB Western Digital WD800BB-55JKC0
Network Card: 10/100 MBPS Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100

Mount Points:
/boot EXT3 /dev/hda1 122 MB
/        EXT3 /dev/hda2 6.2GB
/tmp  EXT3 /dev/hda5 1GB
/var    EXT3 /dev/hdb1 72GB

Note: You can view this systems details at any time by visiting http://wcatserver2.wcatnews.com

I attempted to install an Hosting Control Panel package, but it didn\’t work. Maybe later I can install a package such as ISPConfig (http://www.ispconfig.org)

This server is better with page load times, and speed than the old one. On average it took 30 secs or more to load this blog from the local network. Now it loads in under 10 seconds. Ideally after the RAM is upgraded it should load in under 5 seconds.

If you want more information on this box , please leave a comment or email me.

I am setting up a Mail, Mailing List, and Web Server on this machine, along with the Stark Scanner feed for http://scanamerica.us
You will notice on the right menu bar below the iTunes Video of the Week, a new Web Player of this feed.
For now I set that to plat Chicago FD, due to the fact that the software to broadcast the audio is not setup yet.
Server1 (http://wcatserver1.wcatnews.com) will host backup Web, IRC, and other software.

Both servers support SSL, PHP, and MySQL.