I finally got around to getting my new antenna up on the tower, and resumed my feed a couple of weeks ago. The San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department switched over to P25 I guess, so all we could feed was CHP and Tracy/Manteca/Lathrop area fire. I have a P25 capable handheld scanner, but I didn't want to run that unit 24/7.
I was turned on to software decoding of digital systems on analog scanners the other day. Immediately I decided I was going to use my spare desktop scanner for that purpose. I put together an old PIII laptop and loaded Ubuntu and DSD, added a discriminator tap to the scanner, and set to work working out all of the bugs.
As of right now, I'm just working on setting up the 2nd feed for the digital systems. The first feed will still be analog (local fire and CHP), and the other will be Tracy PD and San Joaquin Sheriff. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be completely up and running.
I have to say, I love a good challenge, and setting up this DSD setup has been a formidable one. It's been a blast, and if you have an analog scanner and can work a soldering iron, you should definitely try it.
I was turned on to software decoding of digital systems on analog scanners the other day. Immediately I decided I was going to use my spare desktop scanner for that purpose. I put together an old PIII laptop and loaded Ubuntu and DSD, added a discriminator tap to the scanner, and set to work working out all of the bugs.
As of right now, I'm just working on setting up the 2nd feed for the digital systems. The first feed will still be analog (local fire and CHP), and the other will be Tracy PD and San Joaquin Sheriff. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be completely up and running.
I have to say, I love a good challenge, and setting up this DSD setup has been a formidable one. It's been a blast, and if you have an analog scanner and can work a soldering iron, you should definitely try it.
