RTPRailfan Forum taken down

Hi yall,

Been a while, been working on a new website. I took the RTPRailfan forum offline because it was getting to much junk and spam on it. It wasn't used very often anyways. I did put the RTPRailfan radio back up. I'll probably leave it up until summer when the heat is too much for the computer in the attic. By the way, I'm setting up a new site called whatstodo_. Should be an interesting site for the Raleigh area at first. I'm just getting the last issues worked out and then I should be good to go.

See ya soon...

Railfan Scanning

Well, I received my Traintenna LP but I haven't had much luck in getting it going. Well, by that I mean it seems to be working but it doesn't pick up any better than my VHF antenna from RadioShack. I'm don't think I have anything setup wrong, I just think it doesn't pick up any better and I'm fairly disappointed because that antenna was $170, my other VHF antenna was $25 and does just as good of a job??? That makes no sense to me. As soon as I get that thing setup the way I want it I'll put the RTPRailfan stream back online. Till then....

Motorola Maxtrac

I bought this Moto Maxtrac 300 because I heard commercial radios are better than scanners. I can belive that. So I got it and it does indeed have better receive sensitivity. I had to gather all the equipment to get it going, radio interface box (RIB), Rib to radio cable (I built), Rib to computer cable (came with the RIB). Then I had to find the software. Took me a while to realize that the way Motorola and others define pins 1-8 on an RJ45 connector is backwards. Anyways, to the good stuff. Last night I hooked it up in my car and I could almost hear a train in Raleigh and I could hear the Cary defect detector no problem. This is a far cry from my scanner where the best I could hope for was Apex. I'm not sure what people have that say they can hear 35+ miles. I can only hear 20 with my maxtrac and a antenna tuned to 160 MHz. How much better can you get than that. Anyways, I'm hoping to get another one of these on the cheap and install it in the attic with the Yagi. This will definitely get better range than my current scanner.