I'm hoping someone may be able to help me out. I'm not a radio/scanning enthusiast, but I like to listen to the Gravenhurst fire department as I have a family member on it. Since they moved to digital, I bought an RTL-SDR dongle and set up all the software as instructed including SDR#, DSD+, and VBcable. I'm fairly certain I have the software installed correctly, but I'm not able to get any decoded audio - even with DSD+ running, and the audio piped through VBcable, all I get is the same digital noise I hear when I tune my analog radio to one of the repeater frequencies. I can't figure out where I'm going wrong, and I have a few questions.
1) Gravenhurst Fire is listed as a trunked system - what are the control and voice frequencies? I can then try to set these up in Unitrunker.
2) What do I do with the colour code and talkgroup information? I don't see any option to enter these into my software - is it only used to program scanners?
3) A $300+ digital scanner isn't in the budget - are there any cheaper alternatives (other than SDR) that I could use? I've heard of the TYT and Baofeng DMR radios which are around $100 or so, but I'm not sure these would work, especially if this is a trunked system.
Any assistance would be much appreciated.