The Treehouse Blog

This week I have been playing with my new PRO-2052 scanner. I bought this model because it has an RS-232 interface that can be used to control it. There is a free piece of software, sctl, that allows you to use it in Linux. I have had to tweak the code a bit for my purposes. I needed line buffering enabled to interface sctl with a PHP script, and also had to change the interfacing to make the ‘sreport’ function work with my model. I’ll probably post a patch at some point. So far, I’ve written a few cheesy scripts to log radio transmissions into a database and play them back. It’s not quite perfect, but it is doing what I want. It would be nice if this guy would release his source. I’d love to have the two-tone pager decoder that he has.

I’ve also been poking around various scanning sites. It looks like there still isn’t any progress decoding the OpenSky system used by the state of PA. Apparently it’s VoIP based. I also found a site with audio samples of various digital transmission modes. Many of the sounds are familiar from old movies and such. I think the PSK-31 sound is sortof like the bridge ambient sound from Star Trek TOS. Also found a great PDF with lots of communications tone tables, for Motorola Quick Call and others.