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[MattMills]

I am planning on building a bootable ISO that starts radiocapture up in a metadata discovery & capture mode that will autodiscover all local systems and attempt to monitor them for metadata information which is submitted to the web infrastructure for aggregation.

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[oniell121]

I'd love to help. What kind of hardware is needed in terms of the radios?

[MattMills]

It primarily uses rtlsdr dongles, at a maximum of 3-4 per available USB bus, however I have used USRP b100 and BladeRF's in the past, it should be possible to make any radios supported by gnuradio work.

[oniell121]

Well, I got a few of those. Any other hardware-specific requirements?

[MattMills]

So I'm going to use this to add some exposition to this. The existing code base can channelize and demodulate motorola smartnet, P25 phase1/2, and EDACS (esk/no esk), and it also has an autodiscovery feature, although it doesn't work the way I'd like. I plan to add some functionality to enable a startup mode that does continuous auto discovery and outputs a log of targeted control channel's activity as well as (maybe) a real time data stream (mostly because I like building realtime interfaces). Most of that code is currently existing, although the current autodiscovery is not performant and would not identify non-demodulatable signals or signals that aren't in the right frequency locations (even 12.5 khz steps), so I'd like to redesign that to work using peak discovery.

Currently, I don't have anywhere for that data to go, although I do have the existing database schema for radiocapture and I know how to scale it up, so I hope to use this to rapidly iterate on a big data analytics platform that allows users to view the captured geo-area/system/site/talkgroup/radio metadata. Of course, a lot of those things need human readable labels, so the interface would need some kind of edit capacity, which I'd like to be collaborative and wiki style, but data based. Ideally I'd like all of this to provide open web APIs so that I can use the data within other web apps. Ultimately I'd like to build a platform that provides interesting detail, data and metadata about the RF environment and transmitters around any receive site. I think initially it'd be a site for doing analysis of p25, edacs and motorola systems at the system, site, talkgroup and radio level.

That said, I'm not a web designer, so I will build entirely basic interfaces. I also have pretty extreme ADD so I was hoping this issue would find some interest and get me excited enough to work on it.

As for other hardware-specific requirements, There aren't really any specific requirements... I've only ever tried to run it on x86, and that's what I'll be building a bootable ISO for for now. I'll also need to build the bootable ISO, but I don't think that is actually that complex in the scheme of things (I've done that before, although not recently). The current primary site captures 18 P25 sites on 3x i7-3770s with 16 GB of ram, but since those are doing audio capture and this would not, the CPU and memory requirements should be a lot smaller as you'd only have 10-20 channels instead of a hundred or more. I'm not currently sure if the code is efficient enough to run on something like a raspberry pi, I haven't tried, and the early ISOs definitely wouldn't be compatible with ARM.

[oniell121]

Sounds good. The hardware shouldn't be a problem. I got some server hardware that isn't flinching with the local EDACS system.

[abqscan]

Sounds interesting. Let me know when you are ready!

[jimmnn]

Sounds interesting, please keep me updated.

[jkarloski]

Im interested in this.