AM Bandscan

Here's a list of some of the more interesting stations I came across on tonight's AM bandscan:

530 AM: Radio Vision from Turks and Caicos Islands; rather weak

555 AM: Radio ZIZ from St. Kitts - was surprised to get this at all (there have been thunderstorms all night), but then again, it's not competing against anything.

670 AM: Spanish language station - possibly Cuba?

690 AM: CINF from Quebec

700 AM: WLW is very weak; good thing I can listen on XM.

750 AM: WSB; also weak.

840 AM: WHAS (airing Coast To Coast AM)

890 AM: WLS is coming in clearly, even though WGN isn't.

1070 AM: Old stalwart CBA is coming in with CBC Radio Overnight, but very weakly.

1120 AM: KMOX coming in with significant adjacent channel interference.

1140 AM: WRVA, also airing Coast To Coast.

1170 AM: WWVA. If I didn't have XM and wanted to listen to Steve Sommers, I could listen to this station. (It comes in much more clearly than WLW.)

1530 AM: I think this is the Cincinnati station that briefly had a liberal talk format (used to be WSAI). Apparently, they did not do well as a liberal talk station, and switched to sports talk last year. I'm listening at 2:24 AM, however, and they have some religious programming now.

1650 AM: Should be Radio Disney from Portsmouth, Virginia, but it's being overpowered by some other station broadcasting a report on Little League baseball in Israel (?). They identified themselves as Radio Shalom, Montreal.

Back in the saddle

I've resumed posting to this blog after a 4-month hiatus. I was able to get MythTV running, but only after acquiring a new system. The specs of my new MythTV box are as follows:

Processor: Intel 3.0 GHz Dual-Core
Motherboard: NVIDIA chipset
Memory: 2 GB SDRAM
Hard Drive: 400 GB SATA drive, 300 GB IDE drive
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 7300
TV Tuner: 2 Hauppauge PVR-150s

So far, the biggest problems were (1) the SATA drivers timing out when I capture to the SATA drive, and (2) an IVTV driver timeout problem.

I didn't really solve the SATA timeout issue; I just switched the MythTV file share to the IDE drive. The IVTV timeout issue was solved by disabling the irqbalance daemon. Apparently, if you have a dual processor system, the irqbalance daemon is enabled by default. The irqbalance daemon "balances" the irq requests across both sets of IRQs (each processor gets 24). If it's not enabled, Linux will still use both processors' IRQs if necessary, but it won't be balanced across the processors. Apparently, IVTV doesn't like IRQ balancing, at least in those cases where a tuner shares a resource with something else - in this case, the on-board sound chipset. After disabling irqbalance, both tuner cards worked fine.