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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

#122
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very accurate description of the problem space. Every municipality has their own jargon, vernacular, and ways to communicate brevity which is key in public safety communications. The communications are often digitized over vocoders that are less than optimal, and then you have the process of recovering voice from noisy communcations channels. This is definitely a very hard problem to solve.

Indeed. The only reason I know is that I tried a few years back and realized that I was asking the computer to do something that I couldn't even do. Anyone that doubts it, just listen to the NYPD feed and try to transcribe for just a minute or two. https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 (edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days…

Ok, here we go: https://feeds.talonvoice.com

Repo is here if you need to report (or just fix :D) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds

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

#123
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 there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.

It's a hard problem. I'm prototyping this here [1]. Any user can tweak or vote on transcriptions, so my goal is to use the user annotations to help train models and make it better.

[1] https://feeds.talonvoice.com

Repo is here if you need to report (or fix) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds

If you want to help with development, reach out and I can onboard + give some test data.

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

#124
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The only reason I know is that I tried a few years back and realized that I was asking the computer to do something that I couldn't even do. Anyone that doubts it, just listen to the NYPD feed and try to transcribe for just a minute or two. https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 (edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days…

Ok, here we go: https://feeds.talonvoice.com Repo is here if you need to report (or just fix :D) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds

Whoa this is awesome! Love the option to fix a transcription, should hopefully help with training if you get some traction.

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

#125

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.

This should, at least the last time I used it:

https://github.com/DSheirer/sdrtrunk

I wrote this parallel scanner. I had tried incorporating DSD, but couldn’t handle more than 2 streams. Though that was several years ago.

https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon

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

#126
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, here we go: https://feeds.talonvoice.com Repo is here if you need to report (or just fix :D) bugs in the webapp: https://github.com/lunixbochs/feeds

Whoa this is awesome! Love the option to fix a transcription, should hopefully help with training if you get some traction.

Thanks! I did a lot of tests and no existing ASR I found could do it to 100%, so I'm using the best ASR I could find and hoping users will help with transcriptions if they want to see it succeed and scale.

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

#128
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...

Oh nice!! I was listening to your platform for NYC Citywide-1 for a couple of hours last night after someone in YT chat of Louis Rossmann's security cam feed (retail store that fixes Macs in Manhattan) dropped some Broadcastify stream links.

https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 CW-1

https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 Manhattan

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

#129
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...

Thank you for your service! FWIW, this was one of the things I wanted to do and learning about SDRs made that possible.

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

#130
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a Hack RF or other SDR and then just run Unitrunker on a computer.

Don't you need at least 2 to track trunked systems?

It is helpful, but not necessary. I am listening in on Seattle's trunked radio system with just one, and I get most of the comms.

I documented my setup here: https://dantler.us/seattle-police-scanner/

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