Mac Compatible SDR Software for Motorola Type II Smartzone Omnilink

bbrady86

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Howdy all you much more experienced people with this realm than myself! I've recently been trying to scan local trunked frequencies using the SDR Trunk software on my M2 Macbook Pro with an RTL-SDR dongle. I love this software's ease of integration with Radio Reference, but I've been striking out on listening to any radio traffic utilizing the SDR Trunk software. My local public safety has 2 different types of trunked systems listed here on Radio Reference: One being the Motorola Type II Smartzone Omnilink system and the other being a P25 Phase II. I've tried all the frequencies on the P25 and I'm not getting anything at all, which is leading me to believe that they're still on the Motorola system for the time being until all the agencies upgrade. I've done some investigation here on the forums and elsewhere and it looks like SDR Trunk cannot decode the Motorola system, unfortunately.

For those of you that are more experienced than I am, which software would you suggest I use to attempt to get this working? It's been pretty discouraging and I've invested quite a bit of hours trying to troubleshoot all of this, to no avail. I'm a relatively tech savvy person, but I have my limits, haha. I'd prefer not to go the Parallel's route, honestly just to run Windows for other software options. I really do appreciate the ease of use and integration of SDR Trunk with the RR database, which is what got me excited about this enterprise in the first place. If you have any other suggestions for Mac that are fairly straightforward to use and can scan multiple frequencies off a single RTL-SDR unit, I'd be willing to give it another shot before I just either give up, or pony up for a Uniden SDS100. I'm really trying to avoid purchasing a $650 unit plus programming fees (because that software's only Windows compatible) if at all possible. The main reason I'm hesitant about purchasing a Uniden unit is that I've heard murmurings about the local agencies going to full encryption over the next year. I'm not entirely sure if this is true or not and I know there's a lot of moving parts to that to get all agencies on board, but I'd really hate to invest that kind of money into something that'll just become a paperweight if all becomes encrypted in the near future.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, let me know what you think and I look forward to hearing your opinions and potential solutions.

-Brandon
 

Enjoi19

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For Smartzone, you'll want Trunk Recorder. You can run Rdio-Scanner as an interface for it as well, which would ingest the recorded files for easy playout.

It does take some playing and configuring to figure out is all. Not the most straight forward, but, users really enjoy it overall. What system are you planning to monitor?
 

bbrady86

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For Smartzone, you'll want Trunk Recorder. You can run Rdio-Scanner as an interface for it as well, which would ingest the recorded files for easy playout.

It does take some playing and configuring to figure out is all. Not the most straight forward, but, users really enjoy it overall. What system are you planning to monitor?
Cool! I'll look into those and see if I can figure it out. I'm trying to listen to Iron County Public Safety here in Utah. It's listed as Utah Communications Authority on the RR trunked database. There are still some analog frequencies around, but within the past year or two since much of it has been switched to digital, my old Baofeng's are becoming less usable other than listening to the local PD that hasn't switched over quite yet.
 

dave3825

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Trunk recorder had another interface that I can’t remember the name of and it was decent for listening when away from home. Was pretty easy to set up from what I recall.
 

enosjones

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Cool! I'll look into those and see if I can figure it out. I'm trying to listen to Iron County Public Safety here in Utah. It's listed as Utah Communications Authority on the RR trunked database. There are still some analog frequencies around, but within the past year or two since much of it has been switched to digital, my old Baofeng's are becoming less usable other than listening to the local PD that hasn't switched over quite yet.
Unitrunker will work for now on the motorola smartzone system, I too am in utah and use Unitrunker and dsdplus. Although Unitrunker can detect phase 1 it will not detect phase 2. Currently the control channels for the digital system are decoding at phase 1, but I imagine this will change which will require u to use something other than Unitrunker. Like either dsdplus or other options..
 

boatbod

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OP25 does Smartzone and has recently received a bunch of updates in that area from @ilyacodes. You'll need 2 dongles (one for control channel, one for voice) and it runs under debian-flavored Linux so you may need to run in a virtual environment on a Mac.
 

boatbod

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@boatbod - are you now recommending Debian over Ubuntu / Mint as the base distro?
Mint is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu is based on Debian, so any/all work fine as the underlying OS for op25.

Where things get sticky is when you want to reach beyond the confines of Debian and run on something like Arch or RedHat. It can be made to work, but you better be real familiar with those OSes to make that happen.
 

marcotor

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hazrat8990

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Did you miss the OP in their post stating they did not want to go the VM route?

Also, what would ProScan or Sentinel do to help the OP with the SDR SETUP they inquired about in the Title of the post, and the body? Did you bother to read any of what was posted?
Did you miss the fact the OP mentioned that Uniden was still a possibility? Did you miss the fact that OP mentioned a specific software that costs $100/yr? Perhaps, it was the entire reason for not wanting to go that route.

I was merely trying to provide a link to a FREE virtual machine, that could be used to access any flavor of SDR software available, and also have the ability to program said mentioned Uniden product, without having to pay a programming fee, IF the OP ends up going that route.
 

bbrady86

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Thanks, all! I appreciate the interaction and giving me some guidance. I was actually able to fire up an old Windows 7 laptop I had lying around from over a decade ago and it was able to download Sentinel no problem. With this being the case, I just went ahead and ordered an SDS100 and will program it using the Sentinel software when it gets delivered in a couple days. After P25 phase 2 goes live, I'll try and play around with SDR Trunk again on my Mac to see if I can get the RTL-SDR to work, but the Uniden will definitely be my primary scanning device. Hopefully all goes well with that here in the near future when the P25 phase 2 switchover happens. Keeping my fingers crossed about that and staying hopeful I'll be able to continue to listen to the radio traffic!
 
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