op25 VS sdrtrunk

looks like it may not be able to do what I want it to do according to this. https://github.com/boatbod/op25/issues/184

I have no experience with DMR myself, but my understanding is that the Boatbod fork of OP25 has experimental DMR support, and I believe SDRTrunk software does, too.

Using OP25[1] with RTL-SDR dongles to implement scanners for trunking P25 radio systems on a computer. And as a sidebar to that, listening in on geographically remote public safety radio systems using Broadcastify[2]. It's basically the old "radio scanner" culture, but taken online and distributed worldwide. People listen to all sorts of stuff, but given my background as a former firefighter and former 911 dispatcher, my main interest is listening to public safety dispatch stuff.

That said, another commenter below mentioned modern "phreaking" and how it's become more radio centric... and while I won't admit to doing anything illegal, let's just say that there's some interesting stuff you can do / look at / listen to these days, especially with ubiquitous and inexpensive SDR hardware and related resources. See the recent story about the KrakenSDR passive radar stuff, and some of the papers that are out there about P25 security flaws, some of the automobile hacking stuff that's RF based, etc., etc. There's a fascinating world out there buzzing around on invisible electromagnetic fields... and you can tap into it with a $30 dongle and a Raspberry Pi (or your PC).

[1]: https://github.com/boatbod/op25

If it's P25 Phase I or Phase II then SDRTrunk might work. boatbod's op25 might be another option, but more complicated to set up.

I don't have a full guide for you, but I use https://github.com/boatbod/op25 for receiving and decoding P25 Phase 1 digital signals on the command line.

op25

If you are handy with Linux you can use an RTL-SDR and OP25 on a Raspberry Pi or really any PC. This is the page for the Fairfax trunked system https://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?sid=6957. Any talkgroup with mode D can be listened to, mode DE is encrypted. If you want I already have config files made up for the police dispatch and fire/ems dispatch channels.

This might be a big ask but I would love some better software for streaming trunked radio systems, I'm using sdrtrunk to stream to broadcastify, but it requires running a whole desktop environment and I feel like it's a ton of overhead for nothing

A second vote for SDRTrunk. I typically don't use a Windows computer, but fired one up to try DSD+, and man, that seemed like a lot of work to get something working that didn't decode traffic all that reliably.

SDR Trunk. It's java so it should work with any OS that supports JVM

Might wanna give SDRTrunk a whirl, I found it infinitely easier to set up than Unitrunker.

SDRtrunk, comes with builtin DMR and other protocol support

It's worth mentioning that for trunked P25 systems, the voice channels are often spread out so they span more spectrum than the ~2.4 MHz bandwidth of an RTL-SDR, so you won't be able to monitor both the control channel and any voice channels that are too far away from it. I have had reasonable success decoding my county's trunked P25 public safety system with sdrtrunk and two RTL-SDRs, but that still only covers about 4.8 MHz of spectrum, so there are still channels that can't be received. I am considering upgrading to an SDR dongle with wider receive bandwidth (some will do 6 or 10 MHz, IIRC) so that sdrtrunk will be able to receive the control channel and any voice channels, and stop telling me it couldn't receive something because it didn't have a tuner available.