Configuring unitrunker/sdrsharp to support digital and analog audio at the same time

[xnaron]

Is it possible to configure a unitrunker/sdrsharp/dsd setup so you can listen to both analog and digital at the same time? Let me explain more...

Using 2 dongles and the traditional unitrunker/sdrsharp/dsd setup with the trunker plugin you have 2 sdrsharp instances running. One of them tuned to the control channel the other tuning via the trunker plugin with remote.dll and sdrsharptrunking.log file in the unitrunker directory.

The unitrunker tuned version of sdrsharp will be tuning the freqs as determined by the unitrunker control receiver. If you have P25 and Provoice checked it will tune the digital conversations as well. Then with dsd running it will listen and decode the digital transmissions. Listening to analog voice is no problem. However the digital voice from dsd will be walked over by the analog (containing digital stream) from sdrsharp. Maybe I am missing something here in the virtual audio cable configuration but I can't think of a way to have the output of the sdrsharp voice muted on the speakers when dsd is playing decoded voice.

If there isn't a way to listen to both analog and digital together I think one solution could be as simple as having dsd playback the analog signal (sort of a passthrough) when it is not playing decoded digital. Unfortunately you would lose the benefit of the filters in SDRsharp.

Another possible solution could be to have the trunker plugin or DSD (disable the listen function for the recording device). DSD could disable it whenever it is playing back digital decoded audio.

Maybe I am missing something really simple here... Any tips appreciated.

thanks

 

[SCPD]

The SDR# plugin that steers SDR# to the voice channel would also need to mute the audio when tuned to a digital voice call. I don't think it does that.

 

[xnaron]

The SDR# plugin that steers SDR# to the voice channel would also need to mute the audio when tuned to a digital voice call. I don't think it does that.

Looking at the sdrsharptrunking.log file it doesn't look like it contains any fields in there that would help sdrsharp determine whether it is analog or digital. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that Remote.dll creates and updates this file. The trunker plug could then mute the audio if this data was present. However it couldn't mute the output to dsd obviously. What I have been playing with is turning the listen checkbox on and off in the "Listen" tab for the properties of the "Recording" tab of the recording device. The trunker plugin could also control turning the filter on and off in sdr sharp for cleaning up the audio. That one might be a bit tricky though.

Will the new version of unitrunker that supports the dongles directly support a connection to a dongle via tcp (ie: rtl_tcp ). If not I'll be stuck with getting this working as my dongles are remote.


thanks

 

[br0adband]

Using 2 dongles and the traditional unitrunker/sdrsharp/dsd setup with the trunker plugin you have 2 sdrsharp instances running. One of them tuned to the control channel the other tuning via the trunker plugin with remote.dll and sdrsharptrunking.log file in the unitrunker directory.

Why would you be running two instances of SDR# there to do that (meaning to monitor at the bare minimum an analog trunking system? Makes no sense to me how you're explaining it.

Unitrunker now has the ability (with the preview build v1.27) - with just one instance of the program - to control two dongles simultaneously for the purpose(s) of monitoring a trunked radio system that it's capable of decoding: one dongle acts as the control channel/signal receiver and then passes the info to the second dongle which acts as the voice channel receiver which passes the recovered audio from the dongle to the sound system in Windows.

I got that type of setup working a few days ago, it's not that tough to do. However, with respect to monitoring digital comms, you're gonna have to get DSD/DSDPlus as the end-point for the audio pathway, and unfortunately because it doesn't work worth a damn using the internal audio subsystem of Windows (it needs that raw unfiltered signal) that's where the problems lie for the digital decoding which probably WOULD require you to use the "classic" setup of Unitrunker + at least the one dongle to get the control channel data + SDR# + the trunking plugin + DSD/DSDPlus.

I guess I'm lucky in the sense that here in my area in Las Vegas, there's hardly any P25 traffic at all aside from Nellis AFB and a handful of talkgroups. I've been monitoring a ton of DMR/MOTOTRBO comms the past week or so but nothing can follow that stuff in terms of the Connect or Capacity Plus trunked versions - the straight simplex stuff is cake to monitor and I've got a whole bunch of stuff on paper trying to keep track of all of it.

Just as a suggestion, you might consider asking an Admin or Mod to move this to the Software Defined Radio or the Digital Decoding Voice Software subforum since it appears what you're attempting to do is more along the lines of those areas I'd say.

 

[xnaron]

Why would you be running two instances of SDR# there to do that (meaning to monitor at the bare minimum an analog trunking system? Makes no sense to me how you're explaining it.

I run my dongles remotely using a network. My dongles are located in a computer near the attic. I connect to them via TCP on my windows machine in the basement via rtl_tcp . As far as I know the preview version of unitrunker does not have the ability to connect to a dongle via rtl_tcp. This is why I use 2 copies of sdrsharp. One for the control channel the other for the voice.

Ideally I would love to see unitrunker support dongles via rtl_tcp and have the ability to listen to both analog and digital at the same time. The ability to hold on a talkgroup at a touch of a button would be the next big thing It is absolutely awesome to see unitrunker supporting the rtl dongles natively.

 

[TurboLed]

Is it possible to configure a unitrunker/sdrsharp/dsd setup so you can listen to both analog and digital at the same time? Let me explain more...

I may have found a solution but that requires some software changes.

If it was possible for Unitrunker to tell (via the remote.dll) if the current conversation is digital or analog, the Trunker plugin could adjust the audio gain to a lower setting when in digital mode.

What I did is I modified the trunker plugin to use the color information of the talkgroups. I have put analog talkgroups in black and digital talkgroups in green. I have modified remote.dll to output the color information that is part of the Unitrunker remote API. I have also modified the trunker plugin to reduce the audio gain for digital calls and increase it for analog calls. Then the digital noise stays as a little hiss in the background but is it not annoying.

Another modification I made to the trunker plugin is to change the squelch value for analog calls. In analog I increase the squelch threshold to 80 so that digital signals are squelched out when a digital call takes over immediately after an analog call on the same channel. At 80 the EDACS beeps are also squelched most of the time. I am using only one RTL dongle and I need to tune out of the control channel. My solution might work better with two dongles, but so far this is working wonderfully.

Here is a video (conversations are in French)
Monitoring digital and analog with SDR# Unitrunker - YouTube

It may not be clear in the video but the Audio Gain is increased to 100% during analog calls, and about 30% during digital calls, near 0% for control channel. (Provoice deconding needs more volume than the control channel)