Here is your Sunday Song and our next trip!

Happy Easter! Well, today will be a very short day. Four hours. That’s it. We have used all 70 hours for this week and won’t gain any back until midnight Pacific time. We are only getting back 8 each of the next two days…but we will try our best. Let’s see what we can get accomplished today!

Good evening from Odessa, Nebraska on this April Fool’s Night. True or False? That seems to be the question here lately.

Whenever I try to enhance the website or improve anything I always get notes, emails, and comments from folks that like something better or hate it, or completely misunderstand what I was even trying to do. Case in point, this new app is only in it’s second day of real world usage, yet the responses range from they love the changes to it is absolutely the worst thing in the world. LOL, Now, how do I figure out what is really good or bad in that case? Yes, I do value everyone’s input since you guys see and know what is going on with the broadcast while I am driving, but let’s look at what we have learned in just the last two days…..

One, the custom app IS capable of broadcasting in decent quality with additional information that should make everyone happy and eliminate the million times a day questions of where is he?, what time it is there?, what is this altitude? and of course the most asked question (despite our maps and website being available) WHERE IS HE?

True, the text colors need work. True, the whole app needs refinement (which only comes from real world testing), and the buffer handling needs to be looked at closer. But, for the second day, it really isn’t bad. I et a graph of viewers for every minute on any stream as well as a graph for how well we held signal. Comparing the old and new streams graphs data, they are pretty much the same with a few exceptions. The new app will NOT remove all buffers, period. I am convinced quite a few folks feel that it should or would. Fact is, uploading video from a mobile device is the very lowest priority on a data tower. Of course, congestion, mountains, etc all play in the formula as well. Believe it or not, so does the weather and even time of day. Yes, even with the old apps, the late afternoon always caused more buffers than morning in the exact same areas! New app or old app, the same fundamental problem still exists.

The old app would go to a black screen when no signal was around, and then the audio had trouble catching back up afterwards. This new app handles it differently by trying to still push up any image or pixel available if possible, cutting audio and then come back 100% live once a good signal returns. It’s simply a different way of handing buffer times. Yes, we will continue to look into improving this.

On another note, the old snowman app we have been using for 8 years has been out of production for the last 5 years! We made it work way longer than the expected lifecycle ever intended! Then add the 5 year old phone and it sure didn’t help matters any. Now, with our new custom app, the new and improved snowman image program has come back to life and is fully reliable – and it works great – from the same single app! No more does it take two phones, two apps to accomplish what we did in the past.

So, before you guys just throw in the towel and discount everything that BRT is trying to do just because it isn’t perfect, just remember, we have made a whole slew of advancements and improvements over the last 13 years and not a single one of them ever worked perfectly out of the box since we adapted them to our website and basically do what many, many people have told me we can’t do. We are the longest running trucker-broadcaster website in the world – for a reason – and that ya’ll, is Fact!

Good evening from North Bend, Washington where it’s a beautiful evening with great scenery! Couple of news items for ya…..

First, you will notice that the trip blogs are now all caught up! We have a new addition to our BRT Team to help with trying to take care of all the different features we offer here on the website. Erick from Phoenix, Arizona has offered his help and is now in charge of his own little corner of the website which is keeping the Trip Blog updated. He joins the ranks of Ken Laws, Marco, Mystic, and of course all the moderators for chat. Welcome him aboard!

The last few days we have been having issues with the website and store not loading properly. I have researched all I know to do and have hired some investigators familiar with hosting to locate and address whatever the major problem is with our servers. Hopefully we find out more in a few days and can get things running smoothly.

The new Trucker Mask tshirts have started arriving and they are already starting to be packaged up and get ready to be mailed out! Please be patient as there are well over 100 orders that need to be sorted. I assure you, things are finally moving out of the BRT warehouse!

Finally, the customer of our delivery has moved the appointment out to Friday 4/16! We will NOT be sitting that long of course, but instead will drop this trailer in Sumner, Washington and head on to the next shipper early in the morning. I will update the next trip once we get a chance. Stay tuned….

Howdy We are back in California for the day, but we won’t stick around for too long! We are unloading at our delivery in Apple Valley, California right now. Once done here, we will broadcast until we get to our hiding spot to sleep and take care of personal things while we take a split sleeper so that we can make our next loading appointment at 8pm tonight. This of course could change because they are already trying to get us an earlier appointment so we don’t have to wait so long between loads. As everything in trucking, things change moment by moment.

Good Morning! So you may have noticed that the lines that draw the route on our trip map has been disappearing and the different distance measurements such as how far to shipper, how far to delivery etc has been all strange or missing entirely. It has been discovered that the geocoding information services we use now want to charge us $99/month for doing what we do. Obviously, we will need to find another solution, so just hang tight. It’s always something lol.

We are now officially releasing our very own custom built broadcasting application. We used to use 2 different phones and three apps to get the GPS information, live broadcast stream, and the Snowman images to the website. Now, everything is one phone and one app! Snowman images has increased quality and so has the broadcast. We are using a new method of trying to hold on during no or low signal areas and have actually pushed up images and video longer than ever before! The text colors now will change automatically between day and night for better visibility. We might tweak colors more, but let’s start with this. More screen information available right in front of you has eliminated the most common questions in chat. No other streaming app has everything ours has. Over the years we have tried lots of them and they never provided everything we wanted for our website. So we had our own built! No, we still can’t broadcast anything if there are no towers, or congested big cities issues.

Welcome to the next generation of bigrigtravels broadcasting!

Morning! Like very early morning! I laid down for a short nap before I got dinner ready. Hahaha I just now woke up! I forgot to turn Snowman back on for you. The allergies and that 70 hour clock is taking it’s toll for sure. Now that I’m up, I might as well get rolling . We will let Snowman run but not stream because past experience shows that there is no signal as we jump over the mountains on UT 20 to get on US Highway 89. Yes, I know we haven’t addressed the text color yet and the imare still too big. Remember, this is only still testing and I haven’t gotten the latest app build released yet.

In case you didn’t know, our California trip had to be dropped off for another driver to finish. We have been hitting our 70hr clock and then the customer moved up the delivery by a day so it was impossible for us to make. Now this trip to Phoenix is also running late even though we have maxed out our hours. Freight is picking up and customers want it quicker than normal and seems to be not enough drivers for the increased demand. Either way, we do our best and let the chips fall where they may.

The backcountry of Utah and Arizona is a beautiful place and an amazing drive, but as always, the best places still have no signal. True solitude at it’s best! I’ll bring you what images we can, you can always look back at some of our previous trips and recordings from the areas.