FAQ
How do you do this?
trunk-recorder records the radio transmissions with 2 SDRS and saves those as wav files. The audio files are picked up by ttt which runs them through Whisper.ai via Transformers to convert them to text. Finally the text is forwarded to apprise which sends the text and an opus-encoded audio file to a self-hosted ntfy which shares the data.
Why?
General curiosity and "where are all those sirens going". I often have a phone with me but not a P25 scanner. I don't really want to listen to the audio as I don't have headphones with me all the time but I can usually read. Hence the transcription.
Did they really say that?
No. Not even close sometimes. Whisper seems to do a mostly ok job at transcribing the call, but sometimes the audio it gets (and you can listen to in the Opus file) is incomprehensible. I'm going to work on trying to improve reception and play with settings to make it better.
That said, in most cases you can get a sense of what's going on which is all this is really useful for anyway.
Is this allowed?
The county has thankfully chosen to allow scanner use of most of what is going on in the county's radio system. I'm thankful for that and I think it gives a good insight into what our first responders have to deal with. They do have other resources which are not monitored here to communicate securely. There are several encrypted channels and they have mobile computer systems and cell phones. None of that shows up here. This sort of lets you ride along without getting in their way - Don't get in their way!
Do you save all this?
No, I don't bother. The audio files disappear after 3 hours and the text after 12 hours. As far as I know it's gone after that. The OpenMhz system might have the audio longer. Note that's run by another enthusiast in the county and they often have better reception than me so if you really need to hear what's going on, they're a good choice.
Contact
joshua at pwcscanner.org will probably reach me. I am not in front of the system most of the time; this is automated and just runs.