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Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

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Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#51

Post by blantonl »

vidanay wrote: post #48
blantonl wrote: post #2

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 the poor audio quality a function of the participating scanners that feed your service, your infrastructure, or the current workload? My local feed is nearly unintelligible.

It is solely a function of the participating scanners. There is a report a problem link on each feed's page which allows you to let the provider know there is a problem.

There are a lot of times providers simply don't know that there is a quality problem.

Edit: there are also a lot of problem vectors. Poor reception, failing equipment, old equipment, and even the case of some providers that don't care and just rush a feed online just to get the premium subscription.

Crowdsourcing content isn't always easy :)

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#52

Post by lozaning »

oasisbob wrote: post #46
blantonl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the…

> including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data Been there, done that. The technique is scary-good, even with cheap hardware. Capture everything, sort by talkgroups, form listen queues ("police", "fire", "police NOT university",) prioritize, and place recordings in queues. Stream queues through ice cast. Drop low-pri messages if you fall too far behind real-time. Speaking of: if anyone…

Im doing the same right now in Minneapolis. Running Hack RF and Unitrunker V2, tapped straight into Minneapolis City Center Multicast. I have a radio reference account so Unitrunker just syncs to its database and all that info auto magically appears.

Here's my live youtube stream and archives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCP1ZetSEA

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#53

Post by trumpoline »

The US is now worse than belarus or russia, you are going to need a lot more tools than radio scanners to regain freedom from your government! Not long until the army will shoot at you as they did at civilians in pretty every country they went to.

Press reporters abducted by the police live? Innocent people gassed? Police ramming protesters? Entire races oppressed? Not thats not the soviet union, it’s The United States of America folks.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#55

Post by oasisbob »

lozaning wrote: post #52
oasisbob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data Been there, done that. The technique is scary-good, even with cheap hardware. Capture everything, sort by talkgroups, form listen queues ("police", "fire", "police NOT university",) prioritize, and place recordings in queues. Stream queues through ice cast. Drop low-pri messages if you fall too far behind real-time. Speaking of: if anyone…

Im doing the same right now in Minneapolis. Running Hack RF and Unitrunker V2, tapped straight into Minneapolis City Center Multicast. I have a radio reference account so Unitrunker just syncs to its database and all that info auto magically appears. Here's my live youtube stream and archives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCP1ZetSEA

Will unitrunker handle multiple simultaneous captures at once?

One of the magical things about the SDR approach is being able to synthesize dozens of streams from a single antenna and several SDR devices. The setup I had could capture ~10 simultaneous transmissions before things started to fall apart.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#58

Post by lozaning »

oasisbob wrote: post #55
lozaning wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im doing the same right now in Minneapolis. Running Hack RF and Unitrunker V2, tapped straight into Minneapolis City Center Multicast. I have a radio reference account so Unitrunker just syncs to its database and all that info auto magically appears. Here's my live youtube stream and archives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuCP1ZetSEA

Will unitrunker handle multiple simultaneous captures at once? One of the magical things about the SDR approach is being able to synthesize dozens of streams from a single antenna and several SDR devices. The setup I had could capture ~10 simultaneous transmissions before things started to fall apart.

I think there's a roundabout way to go about doing that. Essnetially create a lot of additional voice VFO's and then set each one of those VFos to have only 1 talk group with its priority set to 1. And then set the output of each VFO to a different VB audio cable in, then source would be VB audio cable out in audacity.

The hack RF definitely supports grabbing an entire 20Mhz swath of bandwidth that covers all the signal and voice frequencies.

Id be super curious to hear more about your setup, both hardware and software.

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#59

Post by [deleted] »

dmkolobov wrote: post #9
Simulacra wrote: post #3

Most of our local departments use encrypted radios. "Over the past few years, an increasing number of municipalities and police departments, including the District’s, have begun encrypting their radioed communications.."[1.] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/last-of-t...

Completely outside of my area of expertise, so this may be a silly question, but are police transmissions distinguishable from others in their encrypted form? If so, there could still be a use case for knowing _where_ the cops are. Wonder if some sort of mesh could be used to triangulate the positions of these signals.

[deleted]

Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

#60

Post by duskwuff »

save_ferris wrote: post #28
blantonl wrote: post #2

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...

Do you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their scanner comms these days?

Not OP, but: many common voice encryption implementations have serious usability issues which lead to users inadvertently -- or often even intentionally -- disabling encryption

https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...

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