Streamripper on Fedora 20

I live in a desert oasis, right behind a huge radio tower, yet the only radio station that I can reliably pick up is Abu Dhabi Classic, which I guess comes from this stupid tower. That gets rather trying after a while. The internet connection at home is fibre - everything comes over that - TV and net. Therefore, to get something to listen to in my car, I record internet radio streams onto a USB stick using streamripper.

Streamripper works like magic. It somehow avoids recording commercials (well, at least, the vast majority of them) and it will not save the same song multiple times. The main problem with it is getting the stream descriptors into a working format. I used to use streamtuner as my interface to the network radios and it includes streamripper, so the combination was perfect. Lately however, streamtuner doesn't work and I am too lazy to fix it myself. (Update: I got streamtuner to work using a special RPM made by a kind soul on http://forums.fedoraforum.org. The problems are due to missing Python libraries in the spec file).

# yum install streamripper -y

So, now I play music with iTunes on my Mac, make a playlist of the most palateable radio stations and then export the playlist to m3u (select m3u in a dropdown), then copy and paste the URLs into a script for streamripper, something like this:

#! /bin/bash
cd /home/herman/Music
streamripper http://begoodradio.com/itunes/rockmix.pls &
streamripper http://www.radioparadise.com/musiclinks/rp_128aac.m3u &
streamripper http://www.radiogothic.net/play/radiogothic128.m3u &
streamripper http://kocka.limemedia.cz:8000/blanikcz128.mp3 &

and leave it running for a couple of days in a Fedora 20 virtual machine on the Mac. Obviously, the more streams you rip in parallel, the faster your collection will grow and it is easy to get ten of them going simultaneously. In one hour, you can amass music for a fade free cross country trip.

The result is an eclectic mix of music, enough for a year of ordinary driving around, before it drives me nuts again.

Comments

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018: http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern . It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise. Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications. It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it. Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well understood. Therefore,

Weather Satellite Turnstile Antennas for the 2 meter Band

NEC2, 2 m band, 146 MHz, Yagi Turnstile Simulation and Build This article describes a Turnstile Antenna for the 2 meter band, 146 MHz amateur satcom, 137 MHz NOAA and Russian Meteor weather satellites. Weather satellite reception is described here . A quadrifilar helical antenna is described here . Engineering, is the art of making what you need, from what you can get. Radiation Pattern of the Three Element Yagi-Uda Antenna Once one combine and cross two Yagis, the pattern becomes distinctly twisted. The right hand polarization actually becomes visible in the radiation pattern plot, which I found really cool. Radiation Pattern of Six Element Turnstile Antenna Only a true RF Geek can appreciate the twisted invisible inner beauty of a herring bone antenna... Six Element Turnstile Antenna Essentially, it is three crosses on a stick. The driven elements are broken in the middle at the drive points. The other elements can go straight throug

Patch Antenna Design with NEC2

The older free Numerical Electromagnetic Code version 2 (NEC2) from Lawrence Livermore Lab assumes an air dielectric. This makes it hard (but not impossible) for a radio amateur to experiment with Printed Circuit Board Patch antennas and micro strip lines. Air Spaced Patch Antenna Radiation Pattern You could use the free ASAP simulation program , which handles thin dielectrics, you could shell out a few hundred Dollars for a copy of NEC4 , You could buy GEMACS if you live in the USA, or you could add distributed capacitors to a NEC2 model with LD cards (hook up one capacitor in the middle of each element.), but that is far too much money/trouble for most. More information on driving an array antenna can be found here: https://www.aeronetworks.ca/2019/03/driving-quad-patch-array-antenna.htm l Air Dielectric Patch The obvious lazy solution is to accept the limitation and make an air dielectric patch antenna. An advantage of using air dielectric, is that the antenn

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog