Disclaimer: While I’ve tried to keep things relatively simple on this site in hopes that the average visitor can understand everything, I realize there’s a good chance all or part of what follows won’t make much sense to you.

What you hear coming from your speakers (assuming you’re listening to the live feed I’m providing) is brought to you courtesy of a collection of various gadgets.

I’m pulling the signals out of the the air with a  Diamond D130NJ discone antenna. It does a great job from the low VHF range, up into the low 700 MHz range. Once you get into the 800 MHz range, the pattern of these antennas starts tilting upward. Fortunately, there’s nothing I want to listen to that I can’t pull in with this antenna.

What that antenna picks up is brought inside via some Times Microwave LMR-400 cable. It’s marketed as “flexible” but anyone who’s ever worked with this stuff will tell you that “flexible” is a relative term. It’s great cable with extremely low loss but it’s flexible the way a wire coat hanger is flexible, and is about 3/8″ in diameter.

The signal is fed into always at least one (but sometimes more than one) scanning radio receiver. What you listen to on this website and on Broadcastify is originating from a Uniden Bearcat SDS200. This is a phenomenal receiver that can deal with digital trunked systems and analog VHF systems alike. I also have a Uniden Bearcat SDS100 (essentially a portable version of the SDS200) that gets used for various purposes. When I’m using it at home, I connect it to the same antenna as above. If I’m using it as a portable unit, I use a Diamond RH77CA antenna.

Much of the system and frequency information I have programmed into these units came from the extensive database at RadioReference. The rest came from my own personal research and plain ol’ frequency scanning. Anything that wasn’t in the RadioReference database when I found it is in there now.

Once the scanner has received and processed the signals, they’re fed into ProScan, an absolutely amazing and powerful piece of software, which is running on a Windows PC. I use the information it processes and catalogs for various purposes. Everything picked up by my receivers is recorded and sorted based on system and, where applicable, by individual radio ID. ProScan collects an enormous amount of useful information.

This PC is on a hardwired Ethernet connection to my 250/250 fiber gateway. Everything is on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which should run the entire setup for around an hour if I lose power. If it looks like a power outage is going to outlast my UPS, I have a 10 kW backup generator that powers most of the house, including all this stuff.

As far as this website goes, it’s running on a LAMP stack. Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS, Apache 2.4.58, mySQL 8.0.41, and PHP 8.3.6. I’ve got an Icecast server running, which supplies the audio stream to the live player. I had to use Icecast version 2.4.99.3, which is technically a beta release (2.5 Beta 3), because of how I’m extracting and synchronizing the metadata from the Icecast server. This is the magic that lets you see who it is you’re hearing in the live audio player. I wrote the player itself in Javascript. The website looks basic and plain because I designed it, too. Anything that’s broken or looks crazy is because web design isn’t really my thing.