Some folks just don't have much success with using the "cheap USB TV tuner" approach to things aka RTL sticks and with SDR software of various kinds, that's true, but many of us have great success using such tools. I myself don't even own a physical scanner anymore (but will get another one someday when the price is right or a great deal comes along at the right time) and I use my two RTL sticks for monitoring
everything these days from the basic AM stuff on the Civilian air band to the most current digital formats including P25 Phase II.
Is it for everyone? Of course not, but I think that many people in this hobby, especially those of us that have been participating and "listening in" for many decades now, would agree that it's the simple idea of doing something new and interesting that makes the SDR side of things so appealing. Along with the extremely low cost nature of using such RTL sticks coupled with free software being able to do things that the best scanners on the market today still can't do natively that's a pretty powerful "one-two" punch of sorts that can't be dismissed just because it's not easy or simple to set up and use. With the RR database, the need or requirement to actually scan for the main things people want to monitor - police, fire, EMS, local government, etc - is passe since all the info is there, relatively accurate and relatively up to date as well because people contribute the info from their monitoring in the first place: the RR database didn't suddenly just appear out of thin air one day filled with all that info (which is quite significant and continues to grow).
Years from now when SDR hardware and software is even more advanced we'll probably have interfaces that work exactly like a modern high end digital scanner like the 436HP or 536HP happens to do. Unfortunately we're not there just yet and believe me I'd love to have something that looks like a basic physical scanner interface where I can just program it with whatever I want and that's that: one app that can and mostly does it all or comes pretty close to it.
So far yes we're dealing with one or multiple sticks, and with those needing one or multiple pieces of software to make use of them to monitor the content we're interested in but that's part of the fun. It's not a requirement to take on SDR hardware and software, it's just an option that again because of the extremely low cost makes it almost silly to not get involved with it in some manners.
The lack of decent documentation and tutorials out there - even in spite of there being almost no end to the videos on YouTube and other places with instructions on how to get this stuff working - is holding a lot of people back too and I know I try my best to help people when they ask for it (with long posts like this one, I'm wordy, what can I say). There are two books out there on Amazon (available as eBooks too) currently on helping people using RTL-based sticks with SDR software and while they're both "ok" in my opinion they're not exactly what they could be in terms of ease of instruction as well as just flat out making things simpler for people to understand overall. They're better than nothing and I do recommend them, but sometimes I think I could do better (and probably should have years ago).
I've helped people start from nothing but a laptop and end up a few days later (not that it takes
days to do it but those people do have lives with other things going on) with a working OP25 installation tuning in trunked P25 Phase I and II systems where before they simply could not ever monitor those systems at all because of not owning a digital capable scanner - and of course getting a P25 Phase II scanner these days is practically an instant $350+ investment. The guy paid $50 for the laptop, $12 for one RTL stick, and $5 for a pigtail he attached to an old cellular magnet mount antenna and voila, in less than about 12 hours of his actual time he was monitoring a system he'd never been able to monitor before so, I consider that a positive thing.
It's a learning process like any other. 18 months ago I could barely do much of anything with the RTL sticks and Unitrunker much less adding in virtual audio cables to patch signals to DSD (great app for what it is/was capable of) and then to DSD+ (which changed things dramatically for most of us and still does with each new version). Getting a P25 system monitored was a challenge, but getting a
trunked P25 system monitored was pretty much impossible for me.
A few days ago I created a new trunked P25 Phase I system with Unitrunker and DSD+ in about 2 mins, start to finish, completely from scratch, and when I enabled the Signal receiver it worked flawlessly and as soon as I enabled the Voice receiver sent the signal to DSD+ and voila, audio in my headphones as expected. It's become habit to create working systems with Unitrunker now and it just takes time and repetition like all skills learning does.
But if you're happy with a handheld physical scanner, fantastic, ain't nothing stopping someone from using both types of hardware in their monitoring hobbies. When you can monitor DMR/TRBO, NXDN, or several other formats on such a device and with no "outside help" from computers - especially if such systems are trunked, let me know.
