Anyway any thoughts on this do you it would fly?
Hi all, I run a website (
https://radiocapture.com/radio) that sort of accomplishes what you're suggesting, however it's still very much in development (and has been for several years). Rather than using scanners, I use software defined radios along with a good bit of custom software. Instead of capturing individual channels, I capture entire systems in full, the control channel and every voice channel, then the control channel is demodulated and monitored to manage voice recording of every talkgroup on the system.
Currently the software handles EDACS, Motorola Smartnet, P25 Phase 1 (FDMA) and P25 Phase 2 (TDMA) systems. The software will track all active transmissions, record them, and then upload them to the website along with the control channel metadata that labels calls with who is talking and what talkgroup they're talking on. I currently have 4 different receive sites, across which I am capturing about 35 different P25, Motorola, and EDACS transmitters, as well as all their associated traffic.
Obviously, this is no small task, and really the problem what what you're suggesting is profitability. You need to have receive coverage in every physical area, which will include computer equipment, RF equipment, splitters, antennas, and tower access / decent quality locations for receive sites, and all of that costs money. Then you need the web site, which would include enormous amounts of storage (if you were talking about country wide), and a good bit of database and web work in order to manhandle the millions of calls you'd be receiving every day. Currently, radiocapture does all of this for a few systems in Colorado and Pennsylvania, where I already have easy access to receive sites and a reason to do it, and I've already wasted way too much money on it considering only myself and a few other people actually use it to do any listening.
That said, you can listen to any and every talkgroup that is unencrypted (access to some portion of talkgroups is restricted to admin users only), you can listen historically, and if you have two talkgroups that are transmitting at the exact same time (where on a scanner you'd only receive one) they will play back sequentially. There is also some logic to deal with receiving audio traffic from multiple sites for the same call, although not much of it has made it to the normal web UI yet (it just works behind the scenes to pick the transmission with the fewest errors). In fact, some talkgroups will capture the same exact call up to 5 times because we received across that many transmitters. There are also additional things that you can do with a system like this, label radio IDs, track radio IDs across multiple talkgroups, link people into a "view" at a specific time so "replay" an incident, and other such fancy stuff that is possible with a database fill of millions of records.
TL;DR: I'm basically doing what you're asking about, although for a much smaller region, and my conclusion was that there isn't enough people that are interested in it to make a subscription service profitable, I'd love to find a way to make it profitable, but haven't yet.