Adventures in Radio Scanning: Advanced Scanning Techniques with SDR

Instructors - Richard Henderson & Bryan Passifiume

Pre-Requisites - A basic understanding of SDR scanning would be incredibly helpful, but is not essential. We can walk students through it.

Abstract - Many cities around the world have implemented multi-million dollar "trunked" radio systems for their transit, municipal, public safety, police, fire and EMS radio networks. Large commercial organizations (like Caesar's) also use frequency sharing trunked radio systems due to the hundreds (if not thousands) of staff... all requiring radio access. This workshop will walk you through the basics of trunked radio systems, how they work, and how you can set up a listening post to decode these systems and listen in. This workshop will cover setting up and using the Trunk88 scanning software, and how to scan other conventional (non-trunked) radio systems such as MOTOTRBO, Tetra, EDACS, and other systems. If time permits, we will also quickly walk through scanning popular archaic pager systems like POCSAG.

Required Materials - In this case, we will require each student to bring a Windows laptop (not a Surface tablet please) and *at least* 2 USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T sticks in order to properly intercept and decode trunked radio systems.