Hopefully you’ve been able to get darkice running and throwing your favorite railroad voice radio channel to railroadradio.net.

In terms of how much overhead it costs to run darkice, at least on this RPi2B it’s about 12% on average. I also have gpsd running on the RPi so that I can get good time no matter what’s going on with the network connection. This is not necessary by any means, but for me it’s exercise.

I’m using for the scanner radio an old RS PRO2052 scanner (Figure 1). I have a number of them in various stages of decay, but they were a bargain way back when they were liquidating them. These have a serial port connection that, if configured and queried properly, will give the radio frequency/scanner memory channel that the scanner is on at that moment; it’d be cool if I got the tap working so that I could send a tag to railroadradio telling the listeners what freq the radio is stopped on during a transmission.

Tomorrow I’ll take this RPi up to the radio site atop the White Tank Mountains west of PHX and swap out the Windows box, hopefully ridding me forever of the need to care and feed a Windows box on that remote site.

Check into the UP/BNSF Phoenix-area feed sometime soon!