Help Support RadioCapture – A Project that Records Entire Trunked Radio Systems and Provides Online Access to Audio

RadioCapture.com is a website run by Matt Mills that is capable of automatically capturing trunked radio communications from various agencies such as the emergency services and creating publicly accessible historical and live logs of the audio. This is a concept different to radio scanner streams, as all audio is logged and historical audio can be accessed easily at any time.

The system is based on SDR hardware such as the RTL-SDR. Currently Matt runs a receiver in Denver and captures Denver PD which can be listened to on the site without needing to log in. Once logged in (registration is free), other talkgroups available include various agencies in Colorado, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

RadioCapture.com currently available Talkgroups being logged
RadioCapture.com: Currently available talkgroups being logged

Recently Matt has put a call out for people to help support the site via Patreon. He notes that RadioCapture is currently run as a hobby, but with monetary support he hopes to be able to expand the site into a business and have receivers listening and uploading worldwide. He writes:

Hey! Thanks for supporting the continued operation and development of Radiocapture.com. This is a hobby project I've been working on this since late 2011. I'd like to turn it into a real business with your help.

Radiocapture.com is a software defined radio system I built that captures entire trunked radio systems. It demodulates and captures every call on every channel of one, or many systems.

A single RadioCapture server can capture hundreds of simultaneous voice transmissions and a bunch of sites, additionally it's designed in such a way that it can run across multiple computers. My biggest RF site uses 3 machines to capture 19 P25 systems, and easily hits more than 100 active voice channels recordings simultaneously every day.

Matt has also noted that if the site is able to become self-sustaining via Patreon, he hopes to also be able to bring out a RadioCapture kit consisting of 10-16 RTL-SDR dongles, hubs and cables which would allow anyone to easily capture and upload almost all trunked communications from their area. He also notes that at the time of writing:

RadioCapture has 701790271 unique recordings of 503779875 unique transmissions (some calls get captured on multiple transmitters) from the 21 systems that have been captured

If you're interested in talking to Matt about the site, you can also join his Rocket.Chat room at radiocapture.chat.

RadioCapture logged audio
RadioCapture playing logged audio
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cya

Is this legal? I do not think it is, at least not in my country …

kjb

depends on the countries, in some countries the communications are public, recorded and published.

Roger Oveur

welp you know what they say….revolution is good for the economy!

Whiskey7

This site looks like a modified version of https://github.com/ScanOC/trunk-player

Roger Oveur

Funny enough theirs actually quite a few COMMERCIAL sites that already do this. One of options when you subscribe to their service is for marketing/object oriented knowledge ie: if your small/mid size company or designated keyword is mentioned in a news broadcast or in a police or emergency services radio traffic or any “air-wave utilized” technology etc. Kind of like a www search engine…but for the airwaves.

Roy

Hmm, looks like some competition for Broadcastify.com…..

Anonymous

“Become a patreon” for a website that relies entirely on people who submit their samples for free. Such greedy assholes, oi vey!

Sarah - SignalsEverywhere

I don’t think you realize how much time and money goes into not only developing something like this but providing hosting.

He needs terabytes and terabytes of data on top of tons of bandwidth. Running a service even when using freely provided data isn’t free.

Daniel

You are absolutely correct! Just because the information being hosted and uploaded there was done so for free, doesn’t mean it costs nothing to host it and keep it running! I don’t get why some people don’t understand this.

That being said, I dislike the whole idea of this hosting trunked radio online thing. If this grows and becomes popular, agencies will be even faster to implement encryption on they’re systems, effectively killing this small hobby for everyone at a much faster rate than we are currently seeing…