Remote Programmable Transceiver

[KD2JFA]

All,

I'm looking for clarification, as I've yet to been able to find such an item, if there are any professional transceivers that are able to be;

A: Plugged into a PC for recording (I believe I can just use the audio out on most transceivers and plug into the mic port on the PC as an input and use that. If theres an easier way please let me know)

B: A transceiver that can be plugged into a PC full time and still operate as normal. But if needed can be taken off line to be reprogrammed remotely, or even using LogMeIn if the radio can stay connected to the PC at a different location and use the programming software on that PC to remotely program and then have it resume service.

Ive been looking into use a Motorola UHF Analog mobile radio in a dual rack mount for a PC Server, Ideally I would have six (6) of these radios working off of one or two PCs. They'd each only be monitoring one channel at a time, recording any activity and uploading it to a private server which in turn would replay it at a different location. The radios would be connected to an active multi coupler and feeding off a single antenna. There would be NO transmitting what so ever, merely reception. We currently use Uniden scanners but have found that the front end isn't ideal and actually very poor for the large coverage area we are using. Ive personally been able to recieve my FD which is about 20 miles west of my job in my POV via a Motorola CDM1250 connected to a cheap dual band mag mount antenna and transmit back no problem. Yet the scanners are unable to pickup my FDs frequency and the antenna is mounted atop a 12 story commercial building, roughly 155' in the air.

For that reason, I feel having a few professional radios would make up the areas that we are having issues with. Id program the specific channels, and with the higher front end and better quality radio I feel they would easily be able to receive the channels.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks

** And by no means does it have to be Motorola, That is simply what I have experience with and have used**

 

[sfd119]

Use a Motorola/EFJ/Kenwood radio and look into the RX_FILTERED out pin out options. You can get a good, clean sounding feed from those pin outs and it won't matter what the volume is on the radio.

I have five mobiles hooked up to USB sound cards feeding into a program called RadioLog. It's a sweet program and allows for MDC/FleetSync/GE STAR IDs to show up on the screen. The audio quality is suburb and setup is a breeze.

 

[mmckenna]

Yeah, this seems pretty easy to do, especially if you are not wanting to transmit.

I use a lot of Kenwood's at work. You can leave them plugged into a computer full time if you need to for facilitating reprogramming. Just log into the computer remotely, program the radio and send the file. When the radio reboots it'll come back up. Line level output off the rear connectors on most of the radios.

Motorola CDM's could do this too. Benefit would be that you can program these through the rear 20 pin connector as well as pull the "flat audio" off the pin on the back. You could still transmit through them if needed, not taking into account "interconnect" and security legal issues.

Most Kenwood's will do some sort of "power state memory" to automatically turn themselves back on when power is restored. Motorola and Kenwood could use the ignition sense line hooked up to the same power source of the radio to turn back on when power is restored.

 

[KD2JFA]

Perfect, thank you guys all very much. That's what I was hoping to hear!

 

[Project25_MASTR]

Depending on what the gear is going to cost you...it may be cheaper to run some higher end SDR receivers. Especially if you can add some filtering to your multicoupler. You could look at several recordings in a couple of MHz window at once on a single receiver. Need a good CPU for the DSP but that's about it.