Scan Whitley Online is a personal project by Jeremy Jefferson.  Work started on Scan Whitley Online in April of 2010 and was released in “beta” form to the public in April of 2010.  Scan Whitley Online officially launched on September 6^th, 2010.

Jeremy has been developing web sites and web applications for many years.  In high school he worked on the school’s website.  Currently Jeremy has done web work for many organizations and businesses around the Fort Wayne area.

In early 2010 Jeremy decided he wanted to start some local web service to Whitley County that people would actually appreciate and use.  After living right on US 30 for so many years and often wondering why sirens were going by, Jeremy decided a scanner service with a free live stream and even archives would be a potential winner.

It only took a couple weeks of making a website, getting the streaming server setup, and of course getting a scanner before the site was some what functional.  Even though the site was available in April of 2010 we saw our first registered user signup on May 12^th, 2010.  This user found our site via a search engine.

Today our service is growing rapidly.  With over 50 users we expect word of mouth to start to bring us just as many users as web searches do today.  Scan Whitley Online requires users to register to us the service, but the service is, and always will be, free.

For those of you who want the technical details of how our service works, here it is.

Our scanner is a digital Radio Shack PRO-197 scanning the airwaves 24/7 in Larwill.  The scanner has an audio cable hooked up to it that takes the sound to our local server.  However, before the sound reaches the first server it is modified twice.

First the sound goes through what is called a ground-loop isolator.  This removes electrical noise, thus improving the quality of sound.  After that it goes through a mono to stereo conversion making the sound even better, especially when listening to with headphones.

After that, the sound reaches the server.  The server is actually a virtual server, one of many servers running on one physical box.  There the sound is formatted into Ogg Vorbis format and streamed to our server in Chicago.

All of the servers, scanners, routers, switches,  modem, and everything else involved in getting our stream out of our Larwill location and onto Chicago is fully backed up by a powerful Universal Power Supply that will keep our service running for up to 90 minutes in the event of a power outage.  This means that even during bad storms Scan Whitley Online should never go offline, unless our internet itself goes down which is not that often at all.  Even if your power does go offline, you can go back and listen to what happened during storms through our archives.

Once the stream leaves Larwill it takes about a 130 mile trip to Chicago.  This is where our web server and streaming server that our users connect to is located.  There the stream is retransmitted to all our users.  There is also a utility running on the server constantly that records and archives the stream.  All in all the time it takes for our stream to travel from scanner to Larwill Server, Larwill to Chicago Server, and Chicago back to Whitley County listeners is all accomplished in under 10 seconds.

Our server in Chicago has a 100Mbit connection and we can safely support up to 400 concurrent listeners at a time and it wont even slow down our server.  It is also fully protected from power outages.

Currently our service is highly stable.  We hardly ever have down time and when we do it is usually for scheduled maintenance.  Typical down times usually exceed no more than a couple minutes, even for maintenance.

If you like and use Scan Whitley Online, please let others know about us.  We are a free service in which knowing that people are using our service is enough retribution to satisfy our needs.

Below are a couple pictures from behind the scenes.

Here is our two scanners.  The scanner on the left is our old analog scanner that may be put back into use as a secondary non-emergency stream in the future.  The scanner on the right is the newer digital scanner that currently provides our stream.  The black box on the far left is one of our Universal Power Supplies.  This keeps both of the scanners functional for many hours during a power outage.

Above is the heart of our Larwill network providing our stream.  The computer on the left is the server that streams our scanner to our Chicago server.  To the right of that is our managed switch.  On top of that, left to right, is our backup drive, Wifi AP, NAS drive, NAS server, and modem.  To the right of the switch is our router and the large black APC device to the far right is our powerful Universal Power Supply that keeps everything you see pictured running for up to 90 minutes in the event of a power outage.  The speaker on top of the server is what I can use to listen to the scanner if I don't want to connect to the stream myself :).