Bexar County, Texas & Broadcastify

[SAHAM93]

Forgive me if this isn’t the right sub to post under it’s the only one i found that was close.

Ever since Bexar went P25 PII and mostly encrypted you haven’t been able to listen on a scanner except little blips here and there and Fire Dispatch. You were however able to listen to individual talk groups over AARRS and create a playlist on Broadcastify. Now it seems the ability to even listen to individual talk groups has been taken away as of last month, whenever you go to the talk groups it says “This talkgroup was last seen: 2025-06-24T07:53:13-05:00”.

Does anyone know if these talk groups will be coming back, if something happened to the host of them, or if everything is completely gone now and only able to listen to fire dispatch via scanner & Broadcastify? I’m assuming at some point there will be nothing left to listen to here in Bexar at this rate.

Being able to listen to the fire grounds was nice while it lasted.

Appreciate the input!

 

[rattlerbb01]

The person who hosted the Calls and Streams does not have those feeds up anymore. Someone would have to take the initiative to host them. I am a little too far north and cannot receive even the NW Simulcast due to terrain blockage.

For anyone interested, it takes a little setup and a few hundred incurred costs for the equipment, but a good feed setup is not hard to do with a little help from those of us that run feeds. I run 3 calls feeds and one stream for Kendall Co from a BCD536 scanner, 4 SDR dongles, an antenna and amplifier, and two raspberry Pi’s, and they all fit in a modified milk crate with my sweet, sweet cable management 😂

 

[SAHAM93]

The person who hosted the Calls and Streams does not have those feeds up anymore. Someone would have to take the initiative to host them. I am a little too far north and cannot receive even the NW Simulcast due to terrain blockage.

For anyone interested, it takes a little setup and a few hundred incurred costs for the equipment, but a good feed setup is not hard to do with a little help from those of us that run feeds. I run 3 calls feeds and one stream for Kendall Co from a BCD536 scanner, 4 SDR dongles, an antenna and amplifier, and two raspberry Pi’s, and they all fit in a modified milk crate with my sweet, sweet cable management 😂

I have (2) 436HP’s and I just got an SDS200 that’s going to be mounted in my truck in my console (I’m tired of batteries). I’m tech savvy but not that savvy when it comes to Pi’s & coding etc, but i would be interested in figuring out how to listen to those even if im not able to stream them. I went from the 436 to the SDS200 and i know its got a lot of features, probably more than im savvy enough to figure out, haha. Guess i need to jump over to the programming sub and figure out how to listen to them/possibly stream them.

 

[rattlerbb01]

The Pi5 units are actually quite easy to operate, and you can download the BCFY shell software and flash it onto the SD card for the Pi from right here on RR, which makes it so much easier. Once you’ve created your PiConnect account for free, you don’t need to have a separate monitor or keyboard to use the Pi either, just your personal PC or laptop to log in. The only real brain power that gets used is tuning the SDR if it even needs it, and making sure the configuration file has proper syntax, i.e. no missing commas or extra punctuation. But that’s where the community here can help. Bigger busier systems like the central simulcast for the AARRS require at least two SDRs to catch all the traffic but that’s probably enough since most of the law enforcement traffic is encrypted.

 

[SAHAM93]

The Pi5 units are actually quite easy to operate, and you can download the BCFY shell software and flash it onto the SD card for the Pi from right here on RR, which makes it so much easier. Once you’ve created your PiConnect account for free, you don’t need to have a separate monitor or keyboard to use the Pi either, just your personal PC or laptop to log in. The only real brain power that gets used is tuning the SDR if it even needs it, and making sure the configuration file has proper syntax, i.e. no missing commas or extra punctuation. But that’s where the community here can help. Bigger busier systems like the central simulcast for the AARRS require at least two SDRs to catch all the traffic but that’s probably enough since most of the law enforcement traffic is encrypted.

Interesting, I’m gonna have to look into this when i get some more free time!

Thank you!