How come LE in 2020 is not using encrypted communication systems such as Tetrapol? Yes I know Tetrapol is European, but you get the idea.
Cost? They tried rolling out Tetra in a few places in the USA.
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
#12Hi 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 was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area.
"The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. "
Can you explain the rational here?
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#13Most 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...
What I heard is many police departments now encrypt their radio communications, with the exception of dispatch which they keep in the clear as a concession to the media and ambulance chasers.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#14With 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 last Saturday we cancelled a trip to visit family after hearing about a riot on the local highway.
Make sure to look up the frequency your town uses first before dropping so much coin on a radio. If your local LE is encrypted, you're out of luck. But many aren't.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#15Hi 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 was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area. "The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. " Can you explain the rational here?
Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so we're protecting the investment that our core partners have made to write apps.
We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are more than welcome to use the feeds to develop AI models and present that back to us so that we could grant an exception, but the simple reality is that 99.9% of developers that want access to our feeds are simply trying to get yet another scanner app in the marketplace. It just dulites the environment, cheapens the brand, and presents a race to the bottom scenario in the app stores.
I'll readily admit that we don't "know it all" and there could be some serious innovation out there, but the app store market has left a serious bad taste in our mouth of nefarious actors who will go to the ends of the earth to make a buck vs innovate.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#16Hi 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 change their feed? For example one night the Minneapolis police were on a completely different county that was hours away.
Majority of the time, these feeds are relatively low key right...with actual concerning/escalated incidents few and far between. Wondering: is there someway to us ML to identify specific things and provide push notifications to people in a given geography around that? For example it could listen for "shots fired" in a specific area and notify me via sms or whatnot when that occurs.
And AI could be used to show more of an abstract map view if and when "violence" is rising based on action on the scanner, right?
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area. "The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. " Can you explain the rational here?
Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so we're protecting the investment that our core partners have made to write apps. We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are more than welcome to use the feeds to…
Really appreciate the feedback here. That makes good sense on the low quality money grabs.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#18Most 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...
What I heard is many police departments now encrypt their radio communications, with the exception of dispatch which they keep in the clear as a concession to the media and ambulance chasers.
They also refer each other to their MDT or cell when working, which is equally effective at cutting out the public (whether intended or no). In many rural areas, analog FM voice is still in use with no encryption, which I've heard is at least sometimes due to more favorable propagation characteristics for reception at a distance.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#19Most 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.
I think the repeaters would block out any of the mobile radios. So you could see the dispatchers easily, but the individual mobile operators (EMS, Fire, Police) would be hard to distinguish.
If the mesh was every Digital TV tuner inside a municipality, then maybe the mesh could triangulate position.
Re: Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests
#20Hi 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.