21–30 of 202 posts
With the rise of corporate censorship I don't think its wise to rely on app stores for access to police frequencies. Dedicated radios that monitor police frequencies are widely available and you don't need an amateur license to use one (since you're only listening, not transmitting). My city is on 700MHz P25 which requires a fairly pricey radio, but its been worth every penny over the past week. After listening in la…
Anecdotal, but an ex-friend cop told me YEARS ago that they never use their radios for "sensitive" communications anyway, they just call each other on their cell phones so that there are no records of their conversations.
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world through your site.
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
Interesting product/service! I've been familiar with it in the past but really used it a lot over this last week - thank you for offering a free n accessible tool. When, Why and how did you get into it? Does it generate meaningful/worthwhile revenue or is to more to cover overhead? (I only noticed the occasional 30 second commercial intro) Maybe you have a lot of premium subs? Why sometimes do certain cities/counties…
The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and advertising.
About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves. We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly. Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and normalize it all.
We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end, including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution" in our space. Interesting times...
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
Is there a way to report incorrect feeds? I was listening to our local scanner feed last night and growing increasingly alarmed at the amount of activity, until I realized that the scanner audio was actually for a larger city an hour away. I’ve listened before and it’s been correct, but last night it was definitely not.
With the rise of corporate censorship I don't think its wise to rely on app stores for access to police frequencies. Dedicated radios that monitor police frequencies are widely available and you don't need an amateur license to use one (since you're only listening, not transmitting). My city is on 700MHz P25 which requires a fairly pricey radio, but its been worth every penny over the past week. After listening in la…
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
I don't have any questions but I'd just like to say how much I love what you're doing, thank you. When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world through your site.
Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...
Is there a way of legitimately detecting Stingrays? I understand this is the kind of situation where they are actively deployed despite all the social awareness.