ve3nsv said:The nice part about a discriminator tap is your are now ready to run other decoding programs like Mtrunker for Fleetnet and Seatty to decode S.A.M.E. on the Weather Radio transmitters.
I have an old Pro2001 I added a discriminator tap to and use only for the purpose of Trunker/PDW/seaTTY which keeps my other scanners free for regular scanning.
I would recommend everybody pick up an old boat anchor and tap it, if you blow it up you have nothing to lose and it opens up a whole new world of scanning.
Absolutely. I have several scanners and a computer or two dedicated for it - the nice part is, if you can get two sound cards to work in your PC, you can run two UniTrunker or PDW type programs. (It's been said that you can run more - up to eight sources if you have four stereo sound cards in your machine - but I've only had success with two cards and two sources.)
Myself, I run PDW and POC32 on one source at the same time, one for logging and the other for alerting (each piece of software does a job a little better than the other, IMO - and I wish either/both were still being developed). On the other computer, I run Unitrunker, which is a newer/different version of Mtrunker, and have it tracking a trunked radio system 24/7. (If I could get the 2nd sound card in that system going, I'd track a 2nd system with another copy of UT.)
Let me say that if you want to figure out the trunk systems in your area, learning talkgroups and frequencies and such, you want to run a trunker type program. All it needs is the control channel frequency and it gathers up the data being transmitted across it - i.e. when it says "Radio 12345, go to channel 361 for talkgroup 16", you get that. All that kind of stuff is very interesting/useful when you're trying to figure out who is who and what is what, especially on a new or growing system (as Fleetnet might happen to be where you are ). There are versions for Motorola, EDACS, and MPT1327 trunk systems.
Another thing you can use a tapped scanner for is ACARS, aircraft data transmissions. I don't know exactly what kind of messages you get because I've never been successful at receiving an ACARS transmission despite being right under a major air route. I believe it's generally stuff like aircraft location, type, speed, heading, origin, destination, etc.
Welcome to a new element of radio scanning.