sempai
Member
I found an old RadioShack "Pro-97" while tossing junk out and had an extra antenna suitable-ish for CB, and had a moment of curious inspiration about some of the more incessant yappers I've been hearing lately. There's been some conversations here about whether or not some of these jackwagons are actually transmitting, or if there's a hashtag for antisocial weirdos that have decided they will play recordings of people known solely for being Why We Can't Have Nice Things? I thought it was a really good question! And I suspected one that could be answered, so I spent a couple hours on a Friday night that I would rather have spent in an AirBNB with an outdoor hottub in the Poconos with my special lady, but that's Employed Person stuff, so here i am.
having just confirmed the '97 was still functional, i let it run while i was hacking on something else until a recognizable distinctive voice came in all loud and proud for me, and i set to work. i had already staged a lot of this so that i could run with it when the moment came.
# dashboards and monitoring
this is the view of a station in Chicago, IL that I like to use for sanity checking wide-area activity. last summer from 5:30am to 6:50am every morning i was hearing a GMRS repeater in indianapolis, and my house in iowa city is 222 miles away from Chicago and for the sort of activity i'm interested in i should be able to hear a very similar superbowl in iowa city as this station in chicago.
i created a quick workspace in my web browser (arc) and started dragging in some of my favorite KiwiSDR nodes around the United States from my bookmarks, and started lining them up so i could quickly split and stack ~9 stations, watch their waterfalls, and even record them in real time with my scanner screaming at me on my desk beside me.
as i was doing this it occurred to me that if someone gets super serious about this, or if i continue to be unemployed 😂, that the delay from when i hear something with my ears from my local receiver and when other stations hear it and stream it to me (while also noting and watching latency) should be measured and recorded as well if you want to locate likely origins and geography of the person making the transmission. but even just playing around tonight i think you could realistically determine if a particular transmission is someone with more wattage than friends, or if it's a really unfortunate cult of personality that you've discovered. those delays are short though, a transmission originating in chicago takes 0.0011 seconds to get to me in iowa city, and if i zoom in on the tuner i can see when they open the mic. if you dial in the ceiling and floor and width enough you can even see when they take a breath sometimes!
i grabbed the first voice i could recognize easily after paying more attention to CB lately, and i was able to hear them from my house in Iowa (Iowa City), Georgia (Mansfield), Wisconsin (Rudolph), and Illinois (hells yes, ORD). At that point, I made bigger jumps. I couldn't hear them in Montana, Utah or Texas. In fact, that part of the US had a whole different pool of narcissists! I actually recognized someone camped on ch6 wild west, but I very rarely hear him myself in IA. i've seen some of the superbowl youtube videos people post and he's definitely a villain of note. i think it might be a guy that lives in new mexico selling "modified" CB radios that people have strong opinions about? he loves reverb a little too much for my liking but i'm opinionated about everything too.
## ki-wat ?
if anyone is confused what I'm talking about right now with all of this i assume most users of these forums are familiar with a software-defined radio (SDR) and the very approachable rtl-sdr devices and their work-a-likes out there that allow you to create as many receivers as you have antennas, and it's very common for people that have decided to build or buy something like (or some other variety of SDR with IP connectivity), many of those enthusiasts use software called KiwiSDR or something similar, it's most often installed on a computer of some sort (usually something like a raspberry pi but not always) that they then plug their usb rtl-sdr devices into, and you can then operate the software in a web browser to tune to what you're interested in, pick decoders or modulation one one or many attached devices, etc.
in this case, this particular loudmouth was a live transmission that i heard with a measurable delay (within 0.5 second (guessing) across multiple stations in the united states. if you're methodical and consistent in what you measure and record you could probably get a really good idea of where the transmission is originating from, and what likely wattage and antenna could be, considering you can watch as many waterfalls as you have pixels and video cards, and you can record the audio on each along with your own local receivers.
apologies for not catching a name but he's hard to understand sometimes.
audio sample from WI station i believe: Dropbox
### still wat
okay how about this: it's fox-hunting at scale that can be automated and orchestrated if you know what you're looking for.
and as always, when you're relying on the generosity of others it helps to contact them and talk to them about your project if you want cooperation or don't want to be fighting with 5 people over 3 receivers. it also gives you a chance to tell them how much you appreciate them making their station available to you.
fwiw i legitimately had fun doing this tonight, if i were going to get serious about this and start publishing findings i'd go about it more rigorously and gather a lot more data (delay timings, latency of audio stream, the latency of audio interfaces enabling those audio streams, awareness of audio codecs in use (the record button will hand you a .wav file), and i'd record the entire session across my desk with a visible timecode the whole time because it's very easy to get lost in screenshots later. sometimes when you first login you've been left at a talking clock or numbers station and i always peek around a bit. tonight one of the stations i use in WI apparently is monumentally disinterest in CB traffic at all. from like 25.9 to 28.0 it was totally black 😂 the rest of the entire dial was vibrant 😂 usually people don't bother to do an exclusion like that.
good hunting?
having just confirmed the '97 was still functional, i let it run while i was hacking on something else until a recognizable distinctive voice came in all loud and proud for me, and i set to work. i had already staged a lot of this so that i could run with it when the moment came.
# dashboards and monitoring
this is the view of a station in Chicago, IL that I like to use for sanity checking wide-area activity. last summer from 5:30am to 6:50am every morning i was hearing a GMRS repeater in indianapolis, and my house in iowa city is 222 miles away from Chicago and for the sort of activity i'm interested in i should be able to hear a very similar superbowl in iowa city as this station in chicago.
i created a quick workspace in my web browser (arc) and started dragging in some of my favorite KiwiSDR nodes around the United States from my bookmarks, and started lining them up so i could quickly split and stack ~9 stations, watch their waterfalls, and even record them in real time with my scanner screaming at me on my desk beside me.
as i was doing this it occurred to me that if someone gets super serious about this, or if i continue to be unemployed 😂, that the delay from when i hear something with my ears from my local receiver and when other stations hear it and stream it to me (while also noting and watching latency) should be measured and recorded as well if you want to locate likely origins and geography of the person making the transmission. but even just playing around tonight i think you could realistically determine if a particular transmission is someone with more wattage than friends, or if it's a really unfortunate cult of personality that you've discovered. those delays are short though, a transmission originating in chicago takes 0.0011 seconds to get to me in iowa city, and if i zoom in on the tuner i can see when they open the mic. if you dial in the ceiling and floor and width enough you can even see when they take a breath sometimes!
i grabbed the first voice i could recognize easily after paying more attention to CB lately, and i was able to hear them from my house in Iowa (Iowa City), Georgia (Mansfield), Wisconsin (Rudolph), and Illinois (hells yes, ORD). At that point, I made bigger jumps. I couldn't hear them in Montana, Utah or Texas. In fact, that part of the US had a whole different pool of narcissists! I actually recognized someone camped on ch6 wild west, but I very rarely hear him myself in IA. i've seen some of the superbowl youtube videos people post and he's definitely a villain of note. i think it might be a guy that lives in new mexico selling "modified" CB radios that people have strong opinions about? he loves reverb a little too much for my liking but i'm opinionated about everything too.
## ki-wat ?
if anyone is confused what I'm talking about right now with all of this i assume most users of these forums are familiar with a software-defined radio (SDR) and the very approachable rtl-sdr devices and their work-a-likes out there that allow you to create as many receivers as you have antennas, and it's very common for people that have decided to build or buy something like (or some other variety of SDR with IP connectivity), many of those enthusiasts use software called KiwiSDR or something similar, it's most often installed on a computer of some sort (usually something like a raspberry pi but not always) that they then plug their usb rtl-sdr devices into, and you can then operate the software in a web browser to tune to what you're interested in, pick decoders or modulation one one or many attached devices, etc.
in this case, this particular loudmouth was a live transmission that i heard with a measurable delay (within 0.5 second (guessing) across multiple stations in the united states. if you're methodical and consistent in what you measure and record you could probably get a really good idea of where the transmission is originating from, and what likely wattage and antenna could be, considering you can watch as many waterfalls as you have pixels and video cards, and you can record the audio on each along with your own local receivers.
apologies for not catching a name but he's hard to understand sometimes.
audio sample from WI station i believe: Dropbox
### still wat
okay how about this: it's fox-hunting at scale that can be automated and orchestrated if you know what you're looking for.
and as always, when you're relying on the generosity of others it helps to contact them and talk to them about your project if you want cooperation or don't want to be fighting with 5 people over 3 receivers. it also gives you a chance to tell them how much you appreciate them making their station available to you.
fwiw i legitimately had fun doing this tonight, if i were going to get serious about this and start publishing findings i'd go about it more rigorously and gather a lot more data (delay timings, latency of audio stream, the latency of audio interfaces enabling those audio streams, awareness of audio codecs in use (the record button will hand you a .wav file), and i'd record the entire session across my desk with a visible timecode the whole time because it's very easy to get lost in screenshots later. sometimes when you first login you've been left at a talking clock or numbers station and i always peek around a bit. tonight one of the stations i use in WI apparently is monumentally disinterest in CB traffic at all. from like 25.9 to 28.0 it was totally black 😂 the rest of the entire dial was vibrant 😂 usually people don't bother to do an exclusion like that.
good hunting?
