Headless Pi Streamer for BCFY

[KD0TAZ]

I've been poking in and out of this section for several years, watching the evolution. I have played around with Unitrunker, SDR#, and DSD+ a few times. I was able to get them running and working for our P25 system, but they never seemed to be stable enough or "automatable" enough to host a feed with and they required a lot of horsepower to run. I'd like to add a couple more streams to BCFY, for as little as possible, and it seems like the Pi has gotten powerful enough and OP25 has gotten light enough to work together. I have looked through some of the help threads for people who want to run on Pi, but they don't seem to address streaming or headless/autonomous operation. I am not very Linux literate but I know basic commands and I can follow directions if someone could help me set it up or at least point me to some step by step directions.

I'd prefer to do it all without installing the desktop if it's possible, as it would be a waste of resources on these streamers. I want them to start and stream automatically on powerup, with no intervention from me (in case of a power failure). A watchdog to kill/restart in event of a hang would be nice. "Set it and forget it".

Have we gotten to the point where SDR can stream with alpha tags yet?

What I would ideally like to do, if it's possible with OP25, is to add another town's Police/Fire/EMS/SO (6 TG total) and our Highway Patrol (3 TG) in two separate feeds. They are both on the same system, so all the same control channel. Would it be possible to direct one set of TGs to one stream and the other set to the other stream? Or would this need to be done with two separate Pi's? It would not be the end of the world if it needs to be a Pi for each stream, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than extra digital scanners. I would need one dongle per stream I assume? Is one still required or recommended to be dedicated to the control channel?

Thanks!

 

[NebraskaCoder]

You can stream many threads with Trunk Recorder (in fact, if you had the cpu, you could dedicate a feed for every talkgroup on the system with just 4-10 dongles, probably could be easily done with cloud servers but that would entail a reoccurring cost).

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

 

[boatbod]

I've been poking in and out of this section for several years, watching the evolution. I have played around with Unitrunker, SDR#, and DSD+ a few times. I was able to get them running and working for our P25 system, but they never seemed to be stable enough or "automatable" enough to host a feed with and they required a lot of horsepower to run. I'd like to add a couple more streams to BCFY, for as little as possible, and it seems like the Pi has gotten powerful enough and OP25 has gotten light enough to work together. I have looked through some of the help threads for people who want to run on Pi, but they don't seem to address streaming or headless/autonomous operation. I am not very Linux literate but I know basic commands and I can follow directions if someone could help me set it up or at least point me to some step by step directions.

I'd prefer to do it all without installing the desktop if it's possible, as it would be a waste of resources on these streamers. I want them to start and stream automatically on powerup, with no intervention from me (in case of a power failure). A watchdog to kill/restart in event of a hang would be nice. "Set it and forget it".

Have we gotten to the point where SDR can stream with alpha tags yet?

What I would ideally like to do, if it's possible with OP25, is to add another town's Police/Fire/EMS/SO (6 TG total) and our Highway Patrol (3 TG) in two separate feeds. They are both on the same system, so all the same control channel. Would it be possible to direct one set of TGs to one stream and the other set to the other stream? Or would this need to be done with two separate Pi's? It would not be the end of the world if it needs to be a Pi for each stream, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than extra digital scanners. I would need one dongle per stream I assume? Is one still required or recommended to be dedicated to the control channel?

Thanks!

What you ask is possible with a pi3 but will require some linux knowledge. Check out my thread "experiments with op25 and liquidsoap".

Creating two separate streams will require two separate instances of op25 but you'll only need one copy of liquidsoap with a script defined for two streams.

Automation can be done (my dual feed host machine is headless and auto-starts at boot) but I don't have any canned scripts yet. Others may have documented things more thoroughly than I did...

Graham

 

[KD0TAZ]

You can stream many threads with Trunk Recorder (in fact, if you had the cpu, you could dedicate a feed for every talkgroup on the system with just 4-10 dongles, probably could be easily done with cloud servers but that would entail a reoccurring cost).

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

Ok you definitely got my attention with that. I started reading up on it, and now I want to use it for my primary stream too because I love the fact that it records everything and queues simultaneous transmissions into the stream so you don't miss anything. During incidents that use TAC/event channels and generate a lot of traffic (ie: several EMS/Fire pageouts in a short period using different TAC channels) that's a huge issue for my hardware scanner.

Now.. How much horsepower would you say I need? As I said all are on the same system pulling the same control channel/same tower. There are only 5 "dispatch" TGs that I would be monitoring, 2 of which have almost constant traffic (my town's PD and the highway patrol). The other town is much smaller and dispatch isn't as active. The fire/ems dispatch channels are of course sporadic. The rest are all TAC/event channels which would be used continuously for the duration of a call (and there could be several active simultaneously) but are otherwise dormant. I would say with what I want to do there would never be more than 6-8 simultaneous recordings, and that would be worst case. Is a Pi still a viable option here or would I need to step up to something like a NUC (trying to stay low power, as my current setup including network gear is battery backed)? How many dongles would I need?

What you ask is possible with a pi3 but will require some linux knowledge. Check out my thread "experiments with op25 and liquidsoap".

Creating two separate streams will require two separate instances of op25 but you'll only need one copy of liquidsoap with a script defined for two streams.

Automation can be done (my dual feed host machine is headless and auto-starts at boot) but I don't have any canned scripts yet. Others may have documented things more thoroughly than I did...

Graham

I really like the Trunk Recorder angle at this point, I think I'm gonna go that way as it addresses an existing problem as well. Thanks!