Beagle_SDR_GPS VS dsd-fme

If you want to have something similar for use at home, you could take a look at http://kiwisdr.com.

I have one, but you need to hunt down EMI sources, before you can properly use it.

Have you see http://kiwisdr.com/ ?

One of my favorite projects is the KiwiSDR network, which is essentially making radios available online for public use:

http://kiwisdr.com/

http://rx.kiwisdr.com

Your father could be anywhere and enjoy listening from... anywhere? :-)

http://kiwisdr.com/ - Online access to software-defined radios for listening and learning nomenclature as well as a useful SWL tool

find the signal on SDR, kiwisdr.com

For a book look at Gordon West's technician book, for a website hamstudy.org. If you want to listen to HF amateur radio kiwisdr.com, you can also pick up a rtl-sdr for about $25. A great You Tube channel is "Ham Radio Crash Course"

I just checked the map of receivers on http://kiwisdr.com/ and the first Bay Area one I tried (KE6GG out of Daly City, CA) seemed to be able to tune in AM and FM broadcast radio stations.

The project is http://kiwisdr.com/ Regarding closed-source software, people are reverse engineering everything anyway.

Unfortunately, when I was out there I was really wanting to try dsd-plus which runs on Linux so went ahead and and started to set that up. I now realize that Unitrunker, which runs on Windows, may be a better option in terms of more features and possible better decoding.

You definitely can, but legality of such procedure is questionable. DMR uses AMBE codec, which require licensing from DVSI, but you can find open-source implementation on github (mdelib, jMBE). Projects such as DSD-FME[1], which allows you to decode much more than just DMR (P25, NXDN or SDRTrunk[2], which allows you to listen to trunking systems (p25, dmr tier 3 and much more) uses software implementation. OpenWebRX users software decoder too https://github.com/jketterl/digiham

[1] https://github.com/lwvmobile/dsd-fme

If you use dsd+ to determine what kind of "encryption" you may be in luck . if it is just using voice scrambling and you can use https://github.com/lwvmobile/dsd-fme to brute force it if you are determined enough to try every single possible voice scrambler code ( 2^15 -1 so 32,767 possible numbers to go through ) .