Anyone providing feed using SDR#

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Inssomniak

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As the title states?

I was reading that using these Realtek DVB adapters you can now use unitrunker, dsd, and another virtual cable program to basically replace the hardware scanner? I serve a P25 digital trunked feed and thought it could be cool to do it all with these adapters and free my expensive bcd396 scanner again?
 

bamx2

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I wouldn't mind doing it so I don't need to buy a scanner for a couple of vhf channels.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
 

Inssomniak

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I think I will have to grab a few to try.

Although the youtube videos of dsd show the audio quality to not be that great.
 

KD0TAZ

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I have ordered several of the tuner sticks to play with - I currently have my PRO-197 running my feed since our town went digital and I'd like to put it back into my truck.. So I'm hoping I can make SDR work. And if it works, I'd be able to separate police/sheriff/fire/ems into their own feeds to eliminate them stepping on each other - plus add another town that just went digital too without needing 10 grand worth of scanners.

Which brings me to my question.. How demanding is a single feed of an SDR P25 (using two sticks for control and voice) on an antique computer? My current streamer is an old Compaq Pentium 2 with 256MB RAM (max supported) and Windows XP. Would it be able to run an SDR feed? How about two? More? I have other antiques that I can dust off (but I don't really want to have too many running for my electric bill's sake), and I have also been looking at some of the older Mini ITX boards with 12v power supplies (so I can make efficient use of batteries for extended backup if needed)..

Thanks!
 

SCPD

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I p][ will not even come close to running sdr# let alone DSD. I think the bottom of the bottom is at least a p4 if your going to try and use DSD on the same box as the feeds and at least 2 gigs of ram.
 

KD0TAZ

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Ok I finally got my sticks off the slow boat from China, and I played around a bit.. Is there no 'command line' or non-graphical way to do this? I tried it on my laptop (Turion X2 Ultra ZM-88@2.5GHz w/8GB RAM and SSD) and it crawled. It's not the freshest machine in the bunch, but it's not a turd either. The second instance of SDR# for the voice channel just kept crashing. It seems that it is wasting a ton of resources doing graphical things like the waterfall display, which seem to be basically useless after the intial lock-on and fine tune. It also doesn't seem like with all the things that have to be set up and made to work, that it is a viable option to be left unattended and trusted not to crash or restart properly after a reboot.

Any input?
 

johnnybee100

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Question about your laptop

Sir- I joined this forum because of your post about your computer-- Specifically about the processor. I'm doing some research on AMD processors, particularly the Turion ZM line. I've been told that AMD did not release this processor, but on doing a google search, this page came up. Wondering if you could do me a favor and double check to confirm that indeed you're running the ZM-88 2.5 and not the ZM-87 2.4? Sorry to hijack the thread, but I'd appreciate it! Best, jb
 
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Frankly the computer power needed to run SDR# outweighs any advantages. On my old dual core Athlon SDR# works but barely. Maybe if you could turn of the waterfall and spectrum analyzer display a leser machine would work.

As far as I can see SDR# does not scan, so you are wasting a computer to monitor one frequency?

A cheap scanner and a Raspberry PI would be a more cost effective solution.
 

AeStein

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I use two SDR receivers, 2 instances of SDR#, UniTrunker, and DSD+ to monitor a Motorola P25 trunked system and stream it to RR with ScannerCast. I'm running it on a 2.1GHz Dual-Core with only 2.5GB of ram and Windows 8 x64. I use a 4GB USB flash drive with ReadyBoost to allow faster caching. I've also had it running on a virtual machine under VMware ESXi. It runs and sounds just fine.
 

KD0TAZ

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I'm running 2 scanner feeds with SDR#, Unitrunker and scanner plugins using a total of 3 dongles.
Digital P25
Marion County Public Safety - Digital
Analog
Marion County Public Safety - Analog

Computer is a HP Corei3 laptop with 8GB Ram


So is this setup able to self-recover when the computer reboots? Or do you have to manually go through and start things after a blackout/crash?

I would really like to do this, but it means building a new capable machine, and if I have to do that I want to make sure it can be done the way my current feed box is.. It is completely self-sufficient after a blackout/crash.. It automatically turns on when power is restored, and Proscan starts automatically.
 

AeStein

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So is this setup able to self-recover when the computer reboots? Or do you have to manually go through and start things after a blackout/crash?

I would really like to do this, but it means building a new capable machine, and if I have to do that I want to make sure it can be done the way my current feed box is.. It is completely self-sufficient after a blackout/crash.. It automatically turns on when power is restored, and Proscan starts automatically.

By default, SDR# requires you to press the play button after the application starts but I'm sure it wouldn't take much effort to either reprogram or simply create an automation macro to do that for you. Personally though, IMO, I wouldn't worry about SDR# since UniTrunker now provides native control of your RTL receivers all on it's own. UniTrunker can be set up to start scanning as soon as the application is started. I am using 3 RTL's to monitor a Motorola P25 system using nothing more than UniTrunker and DSD+. I do run some java apps that I created to handle some 'special' features like alpha tags and prioritizing the two voice followers but they are certainly not necessary to simply scan a trunked system, decode the digital, and send out the audio to speakers or broadcasting software or whatever the case may be. Using that scenario (forgetting about SDR#), then yes, those programs can be made to run and start scanning automatically on windows start-up by simply adding them to your 'startup' folder. In all fairness, SDR# could be made to do that too if you're still set on using it. It would just take a tiny little bit more effort on your part. Without having previously looked at the code, I can't tell you how easy it would be to modify SDR# to start scanning on program run, but it can't be all that hard. It could be as simple as setting something like "playButtonEnabled = true;" Nevertheless, if you're a little rusty on your C skills (also, I honestly can't remember if SDR# is open-source anyway), then I would suggest finding a simple automation program and record a macro to click the play button, scheduled to execute after SDR#'s main window becomes visible or something similar. Does that answer your question?
 
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KD0TAZ

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Wow I didn't realize the functionality had been integrated, it's been a little while since I last checked in on this.. That's awesome!

Do you need two instances of DSD+ running for two different feeds? What I would like to do is use a three-stick setup to split off my feed into two separate feeds, one for city police/fire, and the other for county Sheriff's Office and EMS (they're fairly active and step on each other on the feed from time to time).. My main motive for going with SDR is to free up my P25 scanner so I can put it back into my truck.. And if that goes well I'd like to add a fourth stick for another TG from the next town over (can be picked up on my scanner with the same control channel). I had actually ordered six of the sticks back months ago, and they've just been laying around waiting to be played with.. If I can build a relatively beefy computer on the cheap, that will handle a bunch of streams, it will make me a very happy boy.. :D

Would you be willing to share your alpha tagging program?
 

KD0TAZ

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I'm also still (actually now even more since SDR# is out of the equation) curious about the actual amount of horsepower needed to do this.. I can get my hands on decommissioned Dell Poweredge servers (2x quad-core Xeon or Opteron processors [8 cores total] @ 2-3GHz, 8-16GB RAM) for pretty cheap.. If one of these can handle a double or triple voice feed (3-4 sticks), it would be like half the price of putting together an i3 or i5 box.
 
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AeStein

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You would need a separate instance of DSD for each digital feed. In my case, I have two separate feeds coming off of the same trunking system but one is digital and the other is analog so I only need one DSD instance running. The analog will come straight out of UT. As for computer requirements, I'm running a 2.1 gHz Dual-Core with 2.5 gb ram and running windows 8 x64. It has running: 3 rtl's, UniTrunker, DSD+, an audio level monitor, two of my own java apps, RadioFeed, and one instance of SDR# (for the moment). Also, usually a Chrome window open on my feed management page. I generally am only utilizing about 70-80% CPU load and 1.5-2 gb ram at any given time. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what you will need. Oh... it's also worth mentioning that I use a 4gb SD card with readyboost to aid in lightening some of the load and make page operations a little quicker. It won't always make a difference but when you are working with low ram (like I am) then it can make certain things faster. I'm also using just on onboard video which shares the primary ram so that doesn't help me either. In any case, that system runs my 3 rtl's and broadcasts my feed just fine.

As for my AlphaTags app, my intention is to release it to everyone fairly soon. I'm in the process of coding it to be relatively universal for the average user and am beta testing it with a few volunteers. I haven't had much free time in the past couple weeks but I plan to at least have a (mostly) stable beta version ready within the next week or two. If you like, send me an email so I can add your address to my mailing list, and I'll make sure to let you know when I have it available or if I happen to need another beta tester to help iron out any last bugs. HuronPerthOPP@gmail.com. I also made another app to handle prioritization with my two feeds (digital and analog) to prevent them from stepping on each other but it's fairly customized to my specific setup. If you are familiar with coding in java, I suppose I could give you the source code for that and you could customize it to your needs. I call it AutoMute. I may be willing to make a releasable version of it but that will have to wait until I'm done with the AlphaTags app.
 

AeStein

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Something I thought I should mention; if, hypothetically, you could send your raw digital audio from the different voice followers to the same audio channel/VAC and ensure that only one would be transmitting at any given time, then it would be possible to use one instance of DSD and it would send the decoded audio from all followers to a single output channel. The problem are, but certainly not limited to; you need to ensure only one voice follower is sending audio to DSD at a time (this means just static too because having one send audio while another is sending static to DSD at the same time would likely greatly decrease the decode quality, if it worked at all - so non transmitting followers would have to be squelched in some manner). Also, DSD would be using the same decode options for each receiver (which is likely going to take away from having an optimal decode). I only say this to explain that it is "possible" to use one instance of DSD for multiple voice followers but is highly not recommended. Besides, DSD+ has very little overhead to just sit there and idle so you'd have to have a really good reason to use just one for multiple feeds.
 
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