DIY Scanner Software

[N9ZLI]

Having done a bit of research (not nearly enough) I'm curious if anyone else has ever developed their own scanning software or has ever connected that serial cable up and opened a terminal program to see if they could "talk" to their scanner. Using a very simple Linux program called minicom I hooked my Pro-528 up and opened /dev/ttyUSB0 as it if were a modem. The upshot was kind of surprising in two ways. 1. Despite what I've read elsewhere, the Radio Shack 20-047 cable appears to operate at 9600 baud instead of 115,200 (unless I'm missing something). 2. I can't get the radio to react to anything I type. That isn't so surprising, I suppose, but I did find that if you turn on a Pro-528 and hold down on the E/PGM button it puts the radio into clone mode. If you then press the up arrow causing the display to read FIRST you can hit the E/PGM again and the radio sends MDL to the serial port about 7 times then enters an ERROR state. I am assuming that this is because it did not get the response it was expecting from the other side of that serial connection. Has anyone else had any experience at getting scanners to read signals from a terminal program like this and if so, would you mind sharing your experience with me?

Thanks & 73,

Joe Denison
N9ZLI

 

[gmclam]

Funny, when you asked if anyone had written their own scanner program, I was thinking, yeah I've done that. But after reading what you really meant - communicating with a scanner via its serial port - that's not really writing your own software. In my case, I had to add the CPU to my scanners, then write the firmware to make them go.I was going to post a pic, but attachments are not allowed here for some reason.

 

[ka3jjz]

Not true. Quote my message or use 'Post Reply' (upper left), and look for a button called 'manage attachments' down about 1/2 the way. You will see the allowed extensions. 73 Mike

 

[Forts]

I did this was back in the day when I got my BC780. There wasn't any software available at the time, so I programmed all my channels and alpha tags with a text script uploaded thru Hyperterm. Now a days with so many good programs out there unless you are a DIY kinda guy it's hardly worth the time.

 

[N9ZLI]

Well, the objective here is something of a learning experiment. I contacted the folks at Butel only to be told, as I expected, that they can not share any information regarding the communications protocols in use in their software. No doubt they purchased a license from Uniden or RadioShack and neither of those two are going to share the information so someone can build an interface for another operating system and I don't think I've got enough money in my hobby fund to afford their licensing fees.

So, I own the Butel software and I have a machine that runs Windows at home and the software works quite well. I believe it was in their EULA that I can't reverse engineer their software so I'm not going to try, but it seems that there has to be a way of possibly snooping at the traffic sent and received through the USB interface. Personally, I'm sure there have to be smarter people out there than I who know how to do this sort of thing. My new job: find them. >:->

73,

N9ZLI

 

[eorange]

I developed an ultra-rudimentary scanner logger for the BC780 using C# about 2 years ago.

I started by using Hyperterm (although today I would recommend puTTY; much better and not quirky) to connect to the scanner, to make sure I could manually issue commands to the scanner, and that the scanner would respond appropriately.

Once the serial port connection was working, I wrote the software to capture hits (channel, frequency, time) to a text box.

You're on the right track for sniffing the USB/COM port. Once you capture that protocol exchange, then you know what to send/receive to the scanner to make it do what you want.

 

[mikey60]

Having done a bit of research (not nearly enough) I'm curious if anyone else has ever developed their own scanning software or has ever connected that serial cable up and opened a terminal program to see if they could "talk" to their scanner. Using a very simple Linux program called minicom I hooked my Pro-528 up and opened /dev/ttyUSB0 as it if were a modem. The upshot was kind of surprising in two ways. 1. Despite what I've read elsewhere, the Radio Shack 20-047 cable appears to operate at 9600 baud instead of 115,200 (unless I'm missing something). 2. I can't get the radio to react to anything I type. That isn't so surprising, I suppose, but I did find that if you turn on a Pro-528 and hold down on the E/PGM button it puts the radio into clone mode. If you then press the up arrow causing the display to read FIRST you can hit the E/PGM again and the radio sends MDL to the serial port about 7 times then enters an ERROR state. I am assuming that this is because it did not get the response it was expecting from the other side of that serial connection. Has anyone else had any experience at getting scanners to read signals from a terminal program like this and if so, would you mind sharing your experience with me?

Thanks & 73,

Joe Denison
N9ZLI

I don't know about the Pro-528, Radio Shack may have a say in that who get's the protocol. If you have an account on the Uniden web site, you should be able to get the Uniden model protocols from there. You do have to have an account, but there is no cost to get the protocols.

Mike

 

[N9ZLI]

You're on the right track for sniffing the USB/COM port. Once you capture that protocol exchange, then you know what to send/receive to the scanner to make it do what you want.

Probably the biggest issue is that capturing data straight off the USB port is nigh impossible for me. I have found a couple pieces of software that claimed to do that. One of them causes my machine to reboot as soon as it's launched and the other one is yielding output that just doesn't make any sense to me yet. I keep thinking that if I had a serial port interface instead of a USB interface it would be easier to sniff the data coming upstream from the radio. I think the USB-to-serial interface (20-047) has a built in RS-232 to TTL voltage converter but I'm not sure. If it were straight RS-232 that would make it very easy to snoop at the data by simply creating a Y cable and putting 2 DB-9's going to 1/8" stereo plug. I could use a couple of diodes to prevent a dumb terminal (I think I've still got an working Wyse-50 around here) from interfering with the datastream but letting it peek at it unintrusively.

My wife is going to kill me. We're getting ready to move and I'm coming up with projects to work on.

Gotta get to sleep.

N9ZLI

 

[SCPD]

My wife is going to kill me. We're getting ready to move and I'm coming up with projects to work on.

Gotta get to sleep.

Get some sleep ... then download Portmon (formerly SysInternals - now Microsoft). Don't need to bother with a "Y" cable. If using a USB to RS232 adapter - the OS (and Portmon) will view the device as another serial port and log both sides of the conversation for you. I use this for debugging my own apps.