Radio scanning dying?

[silverspring]

Who wants to listen to Taxi conversations?
Can't think of anything more pointless and boring.

[Andy]

It's not exactly dying, but it's not the hobby it was either. All the 'interesting' stuff like police (especially the old Regional Crime Squads), fire etc have gone to Tetra, and many services and companies now rely on their phones instead of the old 'radio control'.
I suppose if you like hunting for new frequencies and working out just who you are listening to (and where), it's kind of enjoyable finding out where those things you had discovered on analogue FM have ended up now they've gone to DMR. Some have stayed on their old freq's, others have moved. And in the process you stumble across new stuff. I've just found a Director's link for a TV production company that I'd never found before. All good fun, but not as much as it used to be.

[Werthers]

Since the police moved to Airwave its got boring. There is still some stuff to listen to in VHF and UHF but most of it isn't very interesting.

If anybody is still using an old cordless phones in the area you can pick them up at around 30MHz to 35MHz and baby monitors between 40MHz and 49MHz. I listen to the neighbors across the street sometimes when I'm extremely bored around 47MHz and you can hear all there conversations.

[Andy]

While we are scraping the barrel, I can hear a couple of radio microphones in the 174 MHz band, both of which are used by vicars on Sunday mornings. Their singing voices are hilarious.
There's a motorcycle instructor on 446 as well, he's foul-mouthed even in normal conversation and he gets a bit ballistic when the pressure's on!

[Goffy]

I hear a foulmouthed crane operator from a local building site on 462, mosque call to prayer 454, local hospital voice pager 454 and one bus company that has not yet gone digital.

But even back in the day when I could hear Customs tracking suspect boats on 86, regional crime squad surveillance on 155 and covert CID Ops on 450, I would still find myself listening to PMR a lot because half the fun was trying to work out who the users were. There were lots of wide area community repeaters on vhf high. I still remember my two favourites were 165.2625 and 166.300. Each had several local businesses using them, maybe 20 businesses in total on each repeater and in my area there were about 30 repeaters, I would sit with an A to Z map and a Yellow Pages and work out who the companies were by listening for clues and sometimes the callsigns were a giveaway. Not as exciting as hearing the RCS following big league crims but fun nonetheless.

[Andy]

Oh those were the days, Goffy. I still do it that way, but the A-Z has made way for web maps. And I still enjoy it, but with digital it's so easy to get in a mess as there are multiple users on one channel and (on my AR-DV1 anyway) the voices all sound the bloody same so you have to keep track of the cc's as well. It's always nice to hear some proper analogue FM with its recognisable characters.
Re the mosques, they are all over the place here. They used to be confined to 454, but now they are spreading over 455 and 462.

[apache100]

If anyone thinks there's nothing out there, I just posted a list of UHF (mainly DMR) under West Midlands frequencies.

Haven't posted my VHF list yet as I need to sort that one out, but it includes a security firm with active LRRP, so you can track their cars on google maps, all with free and easy to use software.

[Goffy]

I hear plenty of digital signals on my analogue scanners mostly at 453 and 456. My system is I use my analogue scanners to search out the DMR transmissions and then use my chinese dmr transciever (Retevis RT3S) to listen to them. I'm waiting for prices to come down on the digi scanners. I've been disapointed to find I can't listen to a lot of the DMR on my chinese transceiver...Its not scrambled as I simply hear nothing despite the radio indicating a signal is there. Can Cap+ be listened to? My understanding is as long as RAS is not enabled all dmr can be recieved. I'm new to dmr so still unsure of how RAS and Cap+ work. My local hospital has a Cap+ system with six frequencies allocated...is this like a fequency hopping or trunked setup? When i get my new antenna up things might be better as it may be that these dmr signals are strong enough to open the squelch on my analogue kit but not on the Chinese walkie talkies.

Now with PTT over LTE mobile networks being possible I see a bleak future for scanning as eventually everything will be via mobile networks. Someone posted a link to one of these new rugged walkie talkies that transmit via 4G and it occured to me that the flexibilty of global coverage, data messaging and seamless integration with the phone networks all makes a standalone dmr repeater seem pretty pointless except for short range on-site comms. We will always have analogue marine and air bands of course.

[Andy]

If you can hear that BRRRRRRR data sound on your analogue scanner but no audio on your DMR radio, it's probably just sending data. My AOR just stays on mute when that happens so it doesn't disturb me, only un-muting when voice is coming through.
The AOR has an 'auto' mode so it will decode almost anything (DMR, NXDN, P25, YAESU, D-STAR ans of course FM) without any need to fiddle with it which is very handy for finding stuff. Having said that, most digital seems to be DMR these days.
I've never heard of CAP, what the hell is that? Once I've found something interesting, I put the receiver in the correct (non-auto) mode and shove it in memory.
I must admit to not knowing a great deal about digital, which is why I didn't go for a DMR transciever with all that cc and talkgroup stuff. I think I'd be pulling my hair out.
I think you're right about the future being bleak.

[Metradio]

......I've never heard of CAP, what the hell is that?......

In a nutshell plain vanilla DMR, Talkgroups are allocated to either Slot 1 or 2 on a single repeater.
CAP+, Talkgroups can be allocated both Slots as required and can use multiple repeaters on the same site.
CON+, As CAP+ but can also be routed through remote sites.

Mike

[apache100]

If you fancy dipping your toe into DMR decoding and all of the interesting offshoots, it can be done very easily and cheaply with a RTL-SDR dongle for £20, and some free and easy to use software.

The future isn't bleak, it just demands more of the listener than pressing 'scan', but if you can be bothered, it's worth it. For an outlay of £20, plus building stacked UHF yagis, a manual rotator and a few other bits and bobs, I have successfully decodes various types of DMR encoding, some satellites in the VHF band, Flex and Pocsag pagers, LRRP, ACARS, DRM, Radiosondes etc in addition to the usual analogue VHF airband stuff, HF airband etc.

For £20 and a bit of effort, that doesn't seem like all doom and gloom at all! :-)

Anyone interested, I'll happily post up the kit I use and offer help, but I did most of it by trial and error and lots of headscratching

[WARLOCK]

Hi apache 100 , please can you give me some help by showing what type of kit you use to see if I can get a RTL-SDR dongle working this time I must tell you I have tried before to set one up but failed to get one going ??

[apache100]

Hi.

I use several dongles, a NooElec SESDR SMArt (can be found for £20 - £25 on Amazon) and a genuine RTL-SDR.com dongle (search that term, but be careful to buy from proper retailers - there are fakes around) for a similar price, this has the advantage of working reasonable well for HF using direct sampling on the I branch.

These are hooked up to a home made stacked 8 element UHF yagi array, and a single home made 4 element VHF Yagi on a manually rotateable mast, driven by a knob on my bench via a timing belt, and a long wire, via 3 N-types on the wall of my shed. All sounds like a lash up, but it works and I wanted to keep it simple / cheap as that was the whole point.

I have a 2nd hand PC hosting the software as below.

SDR# (SDR Sharp) as the basic software defined radio software.
DSD+ as the DMR decoder (works for DMR / MotoTRBO, D-STAR, NXDN and a bunch of others I've not seen used in the UK)
LRRP (works with DSD+ to allow you to see locations of LRRP enabled radios)
KGACARS - ACARS decoder
PDW - this has been around forever, but works fine with SDR#
Dream - DRM decoder. Not too many stations around, but a few world service users out there. India, France, Kuwait and Romania are 4 pretty strong decodable ones
WXtoImg - Weathersat decoder, works with NOAA, but haven't tried Meteor decoding yet

I'll post up some images in a bit

[apache100]

Some screenshots

Image5.jpg

Image6.jpg

The top one is a DSD window. I restarted it so you can see the list of decoders in pale blue. In purple are data messages (no speech) regarding radio IDs, and LRRP messages, though these are without actual location data! Probably just activated, but no GPS input. At the bottom is the messages you get when speech is active and being decoded (this is a local hospital porters)

The other pic is a screenshot of the whole desktop (two monitors, my mate is in IT and had some spares going begging) with the SDR# window on the left, a power meter plugin. On the analyser display you can judge relative signal strengths / see stations as they become active, and the lower waterfall gives an indication of active time / modulation type etc. Most of the visible ones are DMR channels, but there is a hospital pager visible there too just above 454 MHz. You can see the digital data burst, then FM speech, then another data burst.

[apache100]

Flex Pager using SDR# audio piped straight to PDW software. Messages blurred so as not to fall foul of 'act on or share'

Imag7.jpg

Image6.jpg