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Showing posts from June, 2019

My own virtual scanner

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In February of this year, using a leftover Lenovo ThinkCentre M73 Tiny, that was original intended to be used a home theater PC, I made a "scanner" using it and 3 RTL-SDR USB dongles. All thanks to Luke Berndt's Trunk Recorder project . Trunk Recorder Trunk Recorder is open source software written by Luke, that using various SDRs such as the HackRF, RTL-SDR-based USB dongles and Ettus USRPs among others, allows the capture and recording of Project 25 (P25) and Motorola SmartNet trunked radio systems plus conventional systems that are P25 or analog too. It runs on Linux, macOS and even on a Raspberry Pi (although it's recommended to be a Pi 3 because the rest probably won't be able to keep up). You can either build it yourself from the source code or use Docker like I did to get it up and running. After configuring a JSON file that sets all the parameters for the instance you plan on running, a CSV file that defines the talkgroups you want to record, you