r/policescanner

Are there any cheaper options than the $700 Uniden SDS100? I do have an RTL-SDR but I don't want to turn on my PC every time I wanna listen

Does anyone have a chirp .img for Los Angeles that they can share? Im planning a trip there.

Hi everyone! Posted here a couple months back about the trunk-recorder + transcription archive I'd built on Charlotte UASI. Got a ton of useful feedback from the community and have been heads down for the last two months working on a major update.

I'd like you to meet Roger.

Roger is an investigator you can talk to. You ask Roger things like "what happened at Park Road last night," "any pursuits in the last hour," "is there anything going on near my house," and Roger pulls real transmissions from the archive, in plain English, and tells you. No more scrolling through hundreds of calls hoping to catch the one you want. No more guessing what 10-codes mean. You just ask.

Some of what Roger can do:

• Pull together what happened at any address, any time. "What happened at Beatties Ford and Sunset on Tuesday" and Roger reads through every call that mentioned the area and gives you the story.
• Watch for keywords on your behalf. Tell Roger "alert me if anyone says shots fired" or "let me know when unit 247 gets dispatched" and you get a push or text the moment it hits the air. Roger auto-expands the phrases too | shots fired also covers shooting, gunshot, gunfire, etc.
• Trace incidents across channels. Roger follows a single incident as it moves between police, fire, and EMS so you can see the full picture instead of fragments on individual talkgroups.
• Cross-reference public records. For Charlotte specifically, Roger pulls in CMPD's ArcGIS feed so you can correlate radio activity to official incident reports.
• See what's happening on a map. Roger plots active incidents across all your subscribed systems on one map, color-coded by severity, with the ability to click any pin to hear the audio.
• Voice input. You can talk to Roger instead of type.

Behind the scenes it's the same trunk-recorder + Pi 5 setup I posted about last time, and transcription is talkgroup-aware (it learns vocabulary per talkgroup over time) and there's an LLM layer that handles the questions. Currently covers Charlotte UASI/Mecklenburg, NC SHP Troop H, Monroe/Ontario NY. About 45,000 transmissions/day, 2.5 M calls archived.

Roger for contributors:

If you run your own SDR setup on a P25 system in a city Roger doesn't cover yet, you'll get full access in exchange for feeding audio to the backend. Same goes for anyone willing to help with talkgroup mapping, ten-code references, or local landmark databases. DM me and we can figure out what makes sense.

Web version is at roger.multido.co for anyone who wants to take a look right now.

I am really excited about this. Open to feedback, criticism, weird edge cases you want me to test, anything.

https://reddit.com/link/1t35fkv/video/3rja3vmnb1zg1/player

Hello all im going to buy my first scanner i live in greece and i have some problems on which one to get, the icom ic r6 has a continuous scanning range but the bearcat has empty spaces, the bearcat has a keypad and a close call button (to find the nearest transmission).

I might have problems with the icom ic r6 not having a keypad.

Thanks, im waiting for your responses

Also is it legal to listen in MI while in your car or driving

I recently purchased this scanner on eBay. The buyer didn’t include the computer interface cable and didn’t mention that it wasn’t included in the listing. He’s going to look for it, but thinking he won’t have it, are there other options besides the official cable? I wish they would have put a standard usb b connection on this thing or even usb mini would be better.

I like using CrimeRadar, but it only shows me stuff hours after it happened and I can't monitor scanners all the time to know what's going on.

Edit: Clarifying what I mean. I know of police scanner apps. I mean like something that'll consistently monitor the audio via the scanners and be able to give me context on what's going on based on what's already been said, so if I tune into a station I'm not like, "okay wait so they're looking for someone? Who? What did they do? I missed it." Something that'll be able to tell me something like "currently happening: police are searching for a man with brown hair and green eyes who robbed a convenience store. They're currently on scene searching for the suspect"