AZScanner
Member
Hi all,
I've been messing with DSD for the past few months and I think I know enough about it to be dangerous. I do know that my current set up which consists of a 3 year old laptop and a 15 year old scanner isn't gonna cut it. I want to go ahead and take the plunge and set up a dedicated Unitrunker/DSD monitoring station using a desktop PC and 2 SDR dongles. Rather than attempt to reinvent this wheel, I thought a good first step would be to seek the advice of fellow seasoned DSD'ers because when I start trying to research things like SDRSharp and GNU radio my eyes gloss over and my brain screams "where's the 'easy' button?"
First off, what is the best SDR dongle to get? Ideally I want this dedicated system to have two of them, one for control channel monitoring and then another for voice comm's which will be decoded with DSD. Is Unitrunker capable of passing voice channel assignments to a second SDR or will I need to write some sort of go-between that can review a log file from Unitrunker and then tune the second SDR? If you happen to have a good source to get these from that isn't ebay (ebay hates my credit card for some unfathomable reason) I could use that also.
Secondly what are the minimum specs that I should be looking for when shopping for the PC itself? I currently have a couple of old AMD boxes kicking around, but I will need to add RAM and a hard drive and all that fun stuff. If the older machine isn't up to snuff, then no sense in spending money on additional hardware for it when a new PC is a better answer. So if someone could pass along the specs they are using that'd be a great start for me.
I also will be using Windows 7 to run this machine. In addition to needing Windows for Unitrunker, I'm not interested in building a linux box because I'm a windows guy and will likely be writing some of my own software that will run in the background and sit over top of DSD and Unitrunker so I can do cool stuff like send alpha tags to an LCD display installed on the front panel and fun things like that. I may also at some point get real ambitious and use the P25 processing code in DSD as a template for an RD/LAP decoder since I've always wanted to do that and there's now some interesting GNURadio code floating around out there in cyberspace that contains the gory details on how to process those bits once you get them separated out into 1's and 0's (more like +3's, +1's, -1's and -3's but I digress). Perhaps someone else who is better versed in C would like to have a gander at the code I found - PM me if so because if you can write it better than I can, I'm not above asking for help.
As I go along of course I will be happy to update this thread with progress and pics of my new toy so that other like minds can build one too if they like. So with that said, I'm officially kicking off this project and I welcome any and all tips, advice and comments.
Thank you,
-AZ
I've been messing with DSD for the past few months and I think I know enough about it to be dangerous. I do know that my current set up which consists of a 3 year old laptop and a 15 year old scanner isn't gonna cut it. I want to go ahead and take the plunge and set up a dedicated Unitrunker/DSD monitoring station using a desktop PC and 2 SDR dongles. Rather than attempt to reinvent this wheel, I thought a good first step would be to seek the advice of fellow seasoned DSD'ers because when I start trying to research things like SDRSharp and GNU radio my eyes gloss over and my brain screams "where's the 'easy' button?"
First off, what is the best SDR dongle to get? Ideally I want this dedicated system to have two of them, one for control channel monitoring and then another for voice comm's which will be decoded with DSD. Is Unitrunker capable of passing voice channel assignments to a second SDR or will I need to write some sort of go-between that can review a log file from Unitrunker and then tune the second SDR? If you happen to have a good source to get these from that isn't ebay (ebay hates my credit card for some unfathomable reason) I could use that also.
Secondly what are the minimum specs that I should be looking for when shopping for the PC itself? I currently have a couple of old AMD boxes kicking around, but I will need to add RAM and a hard drive and all that fun stuff. If the older machine isn't up to snuff, then no sense in spending money on additional hardware for it when a new PC is a better answer. So if someone could pass along the specs they are using that'd be a great start for me.
I also will be using Windows 7 to run this machine. In addition to needing Windows for Unitrunker, I'm not interested in building a linux box because I'm a windows guy and will likely be writing some of my own software that will run in the background and sit over top of DSD and Unitrunker so I can do cool stuff like send alpha tags to an LCD display installed on the front panel and fun things like that. I may also at some point get real ambitious and use the P25 processing code in DSD as a template for an RD/LAP decoder since I've always wanted to do that and there's now some interesting GNURadio code floating around out there in cyberspace that contains the gory details on how to process those bits once you get them separated out into 1's and 0's (more like +3's, +1's, -1's and -3's but I digress). Perhaps someone else who is better versed in C would like to have a gander at the code I found - PM me if so because if you can write it better than I can, I'm not above asking for help.
As I go along of course I will be happy to update this thread with progress and pics of my new toy so that other like minds can build one too if they like. So with that said, I'm officially kicking off this project and I welcome any and all tips, advice and comments.
Thank you,
-AZ