Watch the Android/Amazon Stores for Siren

Status
Not open for further replies.

scandoggy

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Sep 22, 2012
Messages
10
using as hotspot (tethering)

Problem with using as a hot spot (assuming that is in your cellphone plan) is you're using data under your carrier plan by connecting your phone to the internet via the cell network. Possibly there is an app work around for this without maintaining the internet connection via the carrier.
 

wbswetnam

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
1,799
Location
DMR-istan
Siren only seems to work if both the phone and the scanner are working off of the same wifi connection. It will not work if I switch off the wifi and go to my phone's data plan - is that normal? Somehow I thought that the app was supposed to work regardless of my phone's internet connection.
 

scandoggy

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Sep 22, 2012
Messages
10
siren, wifi, cell network

Your local Wifi connection has nothing to do with the cell network. You can connect direct to your phone over your own local Wifi (generally via a router). That's why you use Wifi when you're near your home router so you don't use up your cell network data plan. Siren is not working over the internet, although that is an enticing option to think about. You could leave your scanner at home and totally access and control it via Siren app over the internet via your cellphone provider data plan connection to the internet. That is no different than many other app programs that you might use to access cameras, etc. if you're monitoring your home.
 

UPMan

In Memoriam
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Apr 19, 2004
Messages
13,296
Location
Arlington, TX
Version 1 will only work direct to scanner or on the same network (without some port-forwarding trickery that others have discussed in relation to the iPhone version).
 

garys

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
6,069
I wasn't thinking of connecting over the Internet, but that's a feature some people will want to have.

In theory, there should be three ways to connect.

Access Point mode.

Infrastructure mode.

Via the Internet. Which is where I guess opening ports would be important.

Right now at least, only infrastructure mode seems to be working. Internet mode doesn't exist without hacking around a bit. No one seems to have had success with AP mode.


Your local Wifi connection has nothing to do with the cell network. You can connect direct to your phone over your own local Wifi (generally via a router). That's why you use Wifi when you're near your home router so you don't use up your cell network data plan. Siren is not working over the internet, although that is an enticing option to think about. You could leave your scanner at home and totally access and control it via Siren app over the internet via your cellphone provider data plan connection to the internet. That is no different than many other app programs that you might use to access cameras, etc. if you're monitoring your home.
 

wbswetnam

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
1,799
Location
DMR-istan
OK so it only works as long as I am within range of my home wifi connection. Somehow I thought that it would work regardless of internet connection, but, it is not through the internet at all. It's good for when I'm in another part of the house or out in the yard. Got it. I guess I was expecting too much.
 

Jay911

Silent Key (April 15th, 2023)
Feed Provider
Joined
Feb 15, 2002
Messages
9,378
Location
Bragg Creek, Alberta
I wasn't thinking of connecting over the Internet, but that's a feature some people will want to have.

In theory, there should be three ways to connect.

Access Point mode.

Infrastructure mode.

Via the Internet. Which is where I guess opening ports would be important.

Right now at least, only infrastructure mode seems to be working. Internet mode doesn't exist without hacking around a bit. No one seems to have had success with AP mode.

(This is for the benefit of anyone who is - once again - asking why the 536 can't just be reached from the Internet by default.)

Internet connectivity would be the same as infrastructure mode. In infrastructure mode, your scanner connects to an existing wi-fi network (the 'infrastructure') and makes (connections to) itself available for any devices on that same wi-fi network.

Your wi-fi network, by design, has protection to keep stuff in your local area network away from stuff outside your local area network (aka the internet). Otherwise anybody on the planet could connect to any of the devices on your wi-fi and do whatever they wanted to them.

One of the ways that this is achieved is by blocking 'ports', aka source/destination addresses on devices connected to the internet, from being accessed from across the boundary between your local network and the internet (or vice versa). A number of 'ports' are passed through this boundary by default, such as port 80 (for http, which is how you access websites) and port 443 (for https, the secure version of http). Less-often-used ports are left closed/inaccessible by default, to prevent your devices on your local network from being attacked. For example, you wouldn't want someone to be able to use the port normally allocated to QuickTime streaming, for making a remote desktop connection to your computer, where they could do anything to the machine as if they were sitting in front of it.

The scanner, which if I am not mistaken uses the Realtime Streaming Protocol (RTSP), needs the RTSP ports in your firewall unblocked if you want to be able to use it outside of your home network. If I recall the issue correctly when the 536 first came out and the wi-fi dongle was being messed with by us new users, it was discovered that while RTSP uses a standard, common port for control (554), the ports to be used for the actual streaming video (or in our case audio) and the metadata (i.e. the scanner's screen's text) does not stay the same every time. On one occasion the port might be 50536 (that seems to be common at least for the first run of the client), but on another occasion it might be 6090, or 24318, etc. This hampers your ability to tell your firewall to pass traffic destined for that port to your scanner, because the port continuously changes with each RTSP session.

Even if you were to open your firewall completely and let all traffic pass through, your router still wouldn't know what to do with it once it hit your home network, until you tell it "stuff on port xyz is supposed to be for the scanner". That relies on port xyz never changing (so you don't have to change the rule every time you start a new RTSP session), and also the IP address of the scanner not changing (unless you want to change the IP address on the rule every time the scanner powers on and gets a new IP address from the network).

If RTSP could be made to always use a specific (set of) port(s) for its work, then you could forward those ports (aka port-forwarding) in your firewall/router and it would (theoretically) work. However, part of the RTSP specification is that the data ports (for audio and metadata) are negotiated each time an RTSP session is begun. So on one session it might say to the connecting client (your Android device, or iOS device, or RH-536mkII, or ProScan, or whatever) "today we're using 8006 and 9006" and on the next session it might say "This time we're gonna use 828 and 49152".

It stands to reason - at least to me - that whatever initiates the RTSP session from the scanner side (be it the scanner or the wi-fi dongle) could be coded to use a specific port (or set of ports) every time. Or have it be configurable in the scanner, so the user would have to say "my RTSP data ports will be 50536 and 50538". That way they would know what ports to open up in their firewall and forward to the scanner. Theoretically speaking - at least, in my knowledge of the workings of the protocol - that would make it possible to use the Siren app outside your home network. That's what people are doing when they're connecting VLC to the scanner and then streaming VLC out of their home network to the internet - they can configure VLC to use the same port for audio every time, and inside the network, it doesn't matter if the ports for RTSP between VLC and the scanner change, because the two of them talk on one side of the firewall without having to worry about punching ports open. The downside of using VLC is that you don't get control of the scanner - just the audio - because you're not linking the scanner itself to the internet, just the instance of VLC.

Hope all this makes sense. I'm sure that Uniden and the maker of the dongle firmware are continuing to work on this - but remember the issues that were had with getting the dongle alive in the first place. Communication and collaboration between a minimum of three parties (Uniden execs like UPMan, the engineers in Uniden Japan, and the builders of the code in the dongle) can't be an easy thing to coordinate.
 

wbswetnam

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
1,799
Location
DMR-istan
A theoretical question... if I take the scanner to work with me, set it up in my office and repeat the wireless settings with my employer's wifi (I teach at a university), will I be able to walk across campus and monitor it via the app on my cell phone, say, in the library (using ear buds of course)? I'm not saying that I will do this; just a theory question.
 
Last edited:

Jay911

Silent Key (April 15th, 2023)
Feed Provider
Joined
Feb 15, 2002
Messages
9,378
Location
Bragg Creek, Alberta
That's a good question. Theoretically it probably would work, so long as campus IT hasn't got some firewalls in between different nodes of the wi-fi network. You could try it with a computer as well (scanner set up in your office hooked to wi-fi, laptop in another part of the campus running ProScan or some other application that can connect to the scanner's wi-fi).

The one gotcha you might encounter is that IT may restrict which devices can connect to the wi-fi, either by requiring a username and password upon connecting (which the 536 will never be able to provide) or by only allowing certain devices' MAC addresses online (which just means you have to get them to add the 536's MAC address to the whitelist).
 

wbswetnam

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
1,799
Location
DMR-istan
That's a good question. Theoretically it probably would work, so long as campus IT hasn't got some firewalls in between different nodes of the wi-fi network. You could try it with a computer as well (scanner set up in your office hooked to wi-fi, laptop in another part of the campus running ProScan or some other application that can connect to the scanner's wi-fi).

The one gotcha you might encounter is that IT may restrict which devices can connect to the wi-fi, either by requiring a username and password upon connecting (which the 536 will never be able to provide) or by only allowing certain devices' MAC addresses online (which just means you have to get them to add the 536's MAC address to the whitelist).

Good point - yes, the university's wifi demands both a username and a password, which the scanner wouldn't be able to provide.
 

garys

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
6,069
AP mode will also work (direct link to the scanner).

So far, I haven't seen anyone, including me, be able to get that to work. My phone won't find the scanner IP address. I've set everything in the scanner to the defaults and entered the IP address (192.168.1.1) into my Note 4.

I get a message saying "No Scanner Found At That Address".

Any thoughts?

Oh, the phone is about two feet from the scanner dongle.

Thanks.
 

mitbr

Active Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2007
Messages
1,347
Location
Tampa Bay Florida
I'm stuck here. It's scanning, audio is coming from my tablet. Closing restarting app etc doesn't improve the situation.

Nexus 7 tablet, Android 6.0.1.

i had this happen.. reboot your nexus and unplug and then plugin the dongle on the back of the scanner should fix it.
 
Last edited:

UPMan

In Memoriam
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Apr 19, 2004
Messages
13,296
Location
Arlington, TX
Working fine, here. Did you connect to the access point created by the scanner?
 

garys

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
6,069
I figured it out. This makes sense now that I think of it. I had to change my phones WiFi setting to connect to the scanner, not my WiFi Router. Once I did that, I was in business.

Now that I know that, it's easy.

If I want to connect when I'm home, I'll use the router. If I want to connect to the scanner in my car, I'll just connect to the phone directly.

It works well via AP. About a 1/2 second lag in audio behind the scanner.

Thanks.



Working fine, here. Did you connect to the access point created by the scanner?
 

wbswetnam

Member
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
1,799
Location
DMR-istan
I've been playing with the app for a few hours now, thanks for making this available for Android. I especially like the Home Patrol-style interface, that's terrific. It's like having a DMR-capable Home Patrol! Now it would be 10X better if it were able to control the scanner via internet so on my weekend trips to Mongolia I could still monitor my scanner traffic back home, but hey maybe next year.
 

mitbr

Active Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2007
Messages
1,347
Location
Tampa Bay Florida
Working fine, here. Did you connect to the access point created by the scanner?

Ok for those that still cant get ap to work. Disconnect from your local wifi network then connect to the access point shown on your wifi screen that has the uniden scanner access point name then it will connect.

I know this is what you said Upman but I spelt it out.
 

scandoggy

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Sep 22, 2012
Messages
10
AP Mode with Siren App

OK, Upman states AP mode will work with the Siren App. I haven't had a chance to test this yet. Regarding the internet, you can currently access remote scanners (like WInradio) over the internet but whether this would function well enough in a moving vehicle changing cells with a data connection to the internet who knows. I will take the scanner in the vehicle which is really no problem, and then hopefully use the AP direct connect approach to see and control the scanner on a larger display; either a phone, Kindle, Ipad or similar. That was my whole reason for purchasing the scanner in the first place and at the time of purchase believed the Siren App was available and functioning. So this has been a long time coming. So far the app looks great to me and the more they tweak the controls on it the better. The basic controls are already easier to use than trying to use the front controls of the scanner (BCD536HP).
 

garys

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
6,069
It works, and really well. You just have to remember to set your phones WiFi to the AP SSID and NOT your router SSID.

I've tested it with both of my 536HPs and it works fine. The display is more clearer in my truck than the scanners built in display.




OK, Upman states AP mode will work with the Siren App. I haven't had a chance to test this yet. Regarding the internet, you can currently access remote scanners (like WInradio) over the internet but whether this would function well enough in a moving vehicle changing cells with a data connection to the internet who knows. I will take the scanner in the vehicle which is really no problem, and then hopefully use the AP direct connect approach to see and control the scanner on a larger display; either a phone, Kindle, Ipad or similar. That was my whole reason for purchasing the scanner in the first place and at the time of purchase believed the Siren App was available and functioning. So this has been a long time coming. So far the app looks great to me and the more they tweak the controls on it the better. The basic controls are already easier to use than trying to use the front controls of the scanner (BCD536HP).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top