sdrtrunk VS dsd-fme

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.

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 ) .