iPhone+RadarScope+5-0 Radio=Great Setup!

[mskinner]

I know most of us have grown to like what the iPhone offers. There are a ton of apps out there and most of us know whats useful for storm spotting.

Well, here is one more to consider. Ok...so I ran acrossed something that might be useful to some of you. There are a few really good "scanner" apps for the iphone and most of them are made for police, fire, etc. However, I found one called "5-0 Radio". This app lets you listen to your normal police, fire, etc....BUT there is one thing it can do that I am very impressed with. It will let you listen to live streaming audio in the "background".

Now, a lot of you might be wondering why would you want to listen to police, fire or whatever while viewing the weather radar (or another app). Well, thats not exactly what im talking about. What 5-0 Radio lets you do, is ADD streaming sites to your library. I now have added live NOAA Weather Radio to listen to in the background while viewing the weather radar (RadarScope).

All you do is pick your local NOAA radio station, copy/paste the link into the 5-0 Radio's url field, save it and play it in "background" mode. This basically launches Safari and uses the built-in quicktime player to play the audio. Once its playing, you can close out using the home button on your iphone and then go to your radar program (or preferred app as long as it does not play any audio). If you get a phone call or receive a text messages, the NOAA radio (safari page) will pause until you end your call or finish with your text, then just click on the "play arrow" to continue.

Here is the link to 5-0 Radio - http://appadvice.com/app/334624666
Here is the link to NOAA Weather Radio live - http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/streamaudio.htm#livestream

The iPhone isn't good at running more than one app at a time, but this is one of the exceptions. I thought it was worth mentioning to you all incase it might help free up a Ham Radio or scanner, etc.

To sum it up, just picture looking at your weather radar while listening to live NOAA Radio. Simple as that.

Hope this helps!
73's KC5NOI (Matt)

 

[Stephen Locke]

nice tip . thanks!

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[rdale]

Are you sure you need 5-0 to open this in Safari? Once you open an audio file in Safari, it will play in the background while you run other apps.

 

[Walt VanRheen]

might think about holding off until VZ gets the iPhone. Then you will have lot better 3G coverage.

 

[D. Hayes]

This is how I did it for Wichita on a Android phone:

I downloaded a capable Shoutcast player on my phone. I used Streamfurious Pro since it plays ACC files and it works great. I then went to the NOAA Live page and found Wichita.

They linked to an external site called ScanWichita. You won't be able to stream direct since it uses Windows Media Player so I had to find the source of the audio. A little digging showed me the site uses private Shoutcast streams and I found the below URLs for each stream. I just type in the below URL's in my phones browers and then with the Shoutcast website comes up with this:

Click on the Listen link on the top menu bar and the Streamfurious app will start up and adds them to the stations list and start playing. Later on all you need to do is go into the station list to start playing again.

Police- http://scanwichita.com:8765
Fire/EMS- http://scanwichita.com:8000
NOAA- http://scanwichita.com:8767

So far it's only like a 3 second delay and it's buffering very good.

Alternatively if you are on your phone right now with a capable browser you can click the above links to get to that page in the pic above. Click the Listen link and your shoutcast player will start streaming for you.

Again I have only done this for Wichita.

 

[czenzel]

Nice find! I have been using WunderRadio to run Weather Radio streams in the background using Safari.

WunderRadio doesn't show all the codes and specifics of a radio feed like 5-0 Radio.

One thing I do recommend for those who need to browse while listening to NWR or another scanner in background is to download a browser app from the App Store. It might not be as nice as Safari but they do work. A such browser would be Perfect Browser.