Live audio feed with a RTL-SDR dongle

I'm going to be purchasing a few RTL-SDR dongles next week. This is a new learning experience for me, both with the hardware and software. Going to use them to log traffic on our local P25 system.

Just curious if anyone provides a feed using a RTL-SDR dongle? Is it possible?

I wouldn't because it's not reliable, things tend to break with these setups if you leave them unattended.

ScanPEI said:

I'm going to be purchasing a few RTL-SDR dongles next week. This is a new learning experience for me, both with the hardware and software. Going to use them to log traffic on our local P25 system.



Just curious if anyone provides a feed using a RTL-SDR dongle? Is it possible?

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I don't know if anyone provides a feed via a dongle, but I would imagine it's very possible. I've had mine running for almost a whole day with no issues... Obviously I would use a dedicated computer to run a setup for a live audio feed.

ScanPEI said:

I'm going to be purchasing a few RTL-SDR dongles next week. This is a new learning experience for me, both with the hardware and software. Going to use them to log traffic on our local P25 system.

Just curious if anyone provides a feed using a RTL-SDR dongle? Is it possible?

Click to expand...

Been using one dongle for over a year providing my feed. Used to use 3 dongles, Unitrunker and DSD+. Then that went down to 1 dongle with the multiple VCO option in Unitrunker. Now I use sdrTrunk and 1 dongle and no DSD+ is required.

I put the output in sdrTrunk to a VAC and use Radio Feed to pick that up to send online. Eventually when it becomes available, I won't need Radio Feed either

So i have been trying to do this with two channels in Pittsburgh. I have two PI's and 2 dongles. It will work for a few hours then there is some kind of shift happening with the PPM and gain and what not. I am very close to the repeater sites and get very strong signal on all my other devices. This just does not seem to be a good option at this time. I have the two streams up no in PA / Allegheny / West OPs 2 and 3. They sound like garbage. I am just going to get 2 UV-5R's cheap and can do DCS and CTCSS to keep the clear air instead. Use the PI to stream still.

I don't think a Reaspberry Pi in any form, even the newest one has enough umph to run stuff. There has been other threads already on that. I am going to be getting a Odroid-C2 when they become available again to try the setup I have now but in Linux instead of Windows and it should work as it has 2 gig of ram but time will tell once I get it and get it up and running. I have tried running sdrTrunk on a RasPi 2 and it crashes after running for about 30 seconds or so. There just isn't enough ram on there to allow it to work. My main system that is running the dongle setup I think has maybe 4 gig if that and it is only using (with windows loaded) 1.5 to 1.8 gig total.

There's two live feeds on broadcastify around me that day they're run on dongles. Canada > Ontario > Middlesex.

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A little late to the party here... I think you can have great success streaming with RTL receivers. I don't stream yet, but I leave mine going 24/7 with few problems. Usually, if it fails it's because of a control channel change that I either didn't have selected or the UniTrunker "Chase" setting was deselected (for some reason I have to reselect this EVERY time I open UniTrunker). I've left home for 5 day long weekends, and it remains up 100% with no intervention while I'm away.

I highly recommend Trunking Recorder for archiving and listening to your system.

SDR live feed to broadcastify

Hi there all. My current setup is decoding digital voice through a single SDR card using DSD+ as the decoding software. I can decode the audio beautifully but when it comes to streaming it into Broadcastify, I dont have any luck and only hear the digital noise. Any suggestions people as to best streaming app to use, config settings etc.

Donaldtrumpet84 said:

Hi there all. My current setup is decoding digital voice through a single SDR card using DSD+ as the decoding software. I can decode the audio beautifully but when it comes to streaming it into Broadcastify, I dont have any luck and only hear the digital noise. Any suggestions people as to best streaming app to use, config settings etc.

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If you are hearing digital noise you most likely have selected the wrong input source for your streaming audio. I use RadioFeed on Windows 7 with no problems.

Change the audio source that broadcastify is getting fed. You want the output that you're listening to on your speakers. You may need another virtual audio cable to send the final mix to instead of your speakers. Then if you want to listen in, you browse to trunk recorder from any locally networked web browser.

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M105 said:

If you are hearing digital noise you most likely have selected the wrong input source for your streaming audio. I use RadioFeed on Windows 7 with no problems.

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I have sdr set with vb cable as output and then I have DSD for the p25 signal set to vb cable input as default. The options I got for source input in radio feed were sound capture... line in.. vb audio cable... and headphones (my sound bar from my computer which I hear signal from. Have cycled theough all of these unsuccessfully so it may seem. Another user suggested another vb cable setup to reroute again? If so, how would this be done

You would need to install another separate virtual cable. You would route the audio output from DSD to this new cable. You would pickup the output of that new cable as the input to stream.

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satboy8888 said:

You would need to install another separate virtual cable. You would route the audio output from DSD to this new cable. You would pickup the output of that new cable as the input to stream.

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Thanks mate. I have just downloaded VAC and will see how I go with that, which allows 3 cables for the trial version. I will just need to figure out now how to set them all up. If anyone has been succesful with this and has some images of their setup etc, would be great to see. Am trying to upload the local bushfire brigades for my area.

https://goo.gl/images/I4aOFp

However, I keep my analog and digital on separate cables with two VCO's; that's optional though. One analog audio straight from unitrunker to trunking recorder. One digital from unitrunker digital signal to dsd. Then another virtual cable from dsd audio to trunking recorder. Similar idea but slightly different to keep the audio recordings separate per transmission.

satboy8888 said:

https://goo.gl/images/I4aOFp

However, I keep my analog and digital on separate cables with two VCO's; that's optional though. One analog audio straight from unitrunker to trunking recorder. One digital from unitrunker digital signal to dsd. Then another virtual cable from dsd audio to trunking recorder. Similar idea but slightly different to keep the audio recordings separate per transmission.

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Ok I think I understand the diagram...Correct me if I am wrong

SDR dongle as the receiver
SDR Sharp as the VCO
Voice recorder could be radio feed (to strream the audio)

If this is correct, what I dont understand, how do you set up DSD+ to output to cable 2?

Sdr sharp or unitrunker as a source will both work

When you run dsd, you'll see your audio input and output options. Read the text file associated with it to learn how to set the input and output settings. I find it easiest to make a batch file to save, edit and launch my custom configuration values for dsd.

Going to be doing this soon

I'm already running a very stable implementation of op25 in Ubuntu Linux with three dongles using trunk-recorder and trunk-player. I'm using 3 of the nooElec SDRs with the clock alignment, they don't drift. If you've not seen these two apps monitor an entire system you're missing out. (no need for VAC or multiple windows apps to decode)

With three dongles I am able to capture an entire SmartZone system. With trunk-recorder I am recording almost every single trunk group in the system.

I'm working on a script to take those talk-groups and if they're part of the stream I wish to generate, I'll play them towards darkice so I can stream it. Still working on that piece. I've not had a lot of time to put into this lately but it is coming. There are 2 more streams I want to add to the area I monitor and this is how I hope to do it - solely with this SDR package as the source for two unique streams.

No reason you shouldn't be able to do this. My particular system is using a dual quad-core computer to pull this off, but that is because I am decoding three 2mhz SDRs with 6 VCOs which allows me to record literally every single transmission off the system. You could theoretically scale that back to 1 VCO recorder per SDR if your total talk-groups of interest were limited, and then just stream those, presumably with a little less CPU than I went for. Just give up on doing this solely with a Raspberry Pi. Its not going to happen unless you're just using the Pi as a dongle terminator and you use rtl_tcp to stream the IO to a more capable CPU to do the processing.