Local Police Radio Scanner App Download
Carlita Giandomenico
In this tutorial, I showed you how to find out the frequency used by PD/FD in your local area and how to input those in a BaoFeng UV-5X3. Keep in mind that some Police and Fire departments have/are moving to encrypted (trunked) digital radio. As far as I am aware you can not use this Baofeng radio to pick up on the chatter on trunked frequencies. For that, you will have to either buy a police radio scanner or use an SDR. I might write an article on how to use an SDR in the future.
so my city has a community-run police scanner broadcast on the internet, butthe person who runs it is a bootlicker who's been threatening to shut it downif people are using it to make trouble for the cops. so i figured i'd set up myown. this is how i did it, hope it's useful.
once your RTL-SDR's drivers are sorted out, find the specifications for policeradio in your area on RadioReference. click your state, click your county,scroll down and see if there's a link above a frequency table for you. ifyou're lucky, there is, and if you click it there's a page with a table withSystem Type and System Voice entries at the top. mine has a system type ofEDACS Networked Standard and a system voice of ProVoice and Analog, so the restof this assumes that's what you've got as well. if not, good luck.
this setup lets you listen to things locally, but what if you want yourcomrades with no hardware to be able to also listen? the laziest option is tojust stream the Call History window on Twitch or something, but in theory thereare better options. RadioReference runs Broadcastify, which is designed forhosting police scanner livestreams, but they have to manually approve yourbroadcast, which is annoying for short term activity. you could run an icecastserver yourself or something, but that takes effort to configure. honestly allof those kinda suck but those are your options as far as i know.
run butt, pull up the settings, and under the Audio tab set the Input Deviceto "CABLE-A Output". (for bonus points, set the Streaming Codec to AAC+.) underthe Main tab, Add a new Server and put in whatever info your icecast serveradmin told you to use. now restart your DSD+ and hit butt's play button tostart streaming, and you should be running a livestream of your police scannerthat is accessible over the internet.