[lsllc]

Anyone have any recommendations on a "modern" digital trunking scanner? (handheld)

I have an old GRE PSR-500 which isn't terrible, but I'm looking to replace it as it has next to zero software support for programming it and doing it by hand is a real pain.

You'd think in this day and age someone would make a scanner with a companion app connected to Radio Reference for programming. Would be nice to have bluetooth audio too.

FWIW, GRE stopped making scanners in 2012, and later closed down and sold off their scanner business to Whistler. Supposedly Whister were going to release a new scanner, the TRX-100, but cancelled it. Seems like handheld scanner technology is still stuck in the '80s.

[jcrawfordor]

I think much of the scanning crowd has either 1) abandoned interest in digital trunking systems or 2) switched to SDRs, which is an unfortunate state of affairs as the state-of-the-art in SDR trunking decoders is actually pretty bad.

[fortran77]

You'd be wrong if you think that. We're all using Uniden SD200

See: https://www.bearcatwarehouse.com/Trunking

[jcrawfordor]

Good to know, although I fear I may find my wallet $700 lighter.

[jcims]

I went hogwild with this at the beginning of the RTLSDR era of SDR. I just started picking it back up after getting some better hardware and was kind of bummed at how little the quality of the voice decoding has progressed despite what appears to be a ton of energy invested.

If I recall correctly some of it is licensed and/or patented and people are just having to reverse engineer the protocols. I’d pay for a commercial demodulator to snap in.

[rachelbythebay]

You can buy the DVSI codec wrapped up in a USB stick from NW Digital Radio. They call it the "ThumbDV". It looks like a serial port to your machine, and you can just poke it with the right commands and it'll turn raw codec data into raw audio data (and vice-versa).

I used it for decoding the AMBE+2 stuff on newer P25 systems. It wasn't great but it did mean I didn't run afoul of any patent issues if I wanted to sell the system to someone else. OP25 is great but I didn't want to take the risk.

[jcims]

Whoa, interesting, thanks for the heads up! I've bookmarked that puppy.

Whatever I was watching recently still had that slurring effect in all of the speech that I recall from back in the day, but I just checked out some recent recordings from OP25 and that is actually quite a bit improved. May just try that out first and see where it goes. Thanks!

[ChuckMcM]

that would be the Uniden SD100. I've got the SD200 which is the "console" model.

[wiml]

Since we're on HN, how about an RTLSDR, a Pi, and op25?