Police Scanner App?

[TimChgo9]

It's kind of funny...

I live in the largest railroad hub in the nation. There are no less than 6 railroads within 5 miles of my house. The busiest main line in the Western Suburbs is right across the street from me,(over 100 trains a day) and yet, there are no scanner streams for Chicago area railroads (BNSF, UP, IHB, CSX, NS, CP Rail, CN, EJ&E....) I looked on Droid Live, and couldn't find any. There was one feed for NE IL/NW IN, but it was nothing but static. I have a scanner programmed with all of the AAR frequencies the railroads use, but I would love to have it on my Droid, just for the convenience.

Public safety frequencies, with a few exceptions, aren't really digital around here. Some of the NW Suburbs are on 800Mhz trunked, but Chicago Fire Dept. is still on 154.130, and 153.770, and all of the towns around me (MABAS Division 10) still operate on 154.250.

 

[christim]

It's kind of funny...

I live in the largest railroad hub in the nation. I have a scanner programmed with all of the AAR frequencies the railroads use, but I would love to have it on my Droid, just for the convenience.

I'm guessing that if you became a feed provider you'd need a scanner for each frequency and that one scanner wouldn't work. For that matter, I'd think you'd need a separate soundcard (computer?) for each one too!

 

[bhawks]

I use DroidLive Lite. If you go to radioreference.com and go to their Live Audio page, you may find your area's police/fire scanner streams. When you find the stream you want, choose winamp as the player and the stream will automatically open in DroidLive. I tried creating favorites, but the streams change all the time so it wasn't connecting sometimes. Just bookmark the site and open from there. Oh and it doesn't work well with 3G, only wifi in my experience.

Thanks for the tip, works good for me. The "choose winamp" was the critical part of the instructions for me. Missed it the first pass through.

Can you explain this further? I downloaded droidlive, are you supposed to go to radioreference website on your phone or computer? When I tried it on the droid it said it required adobe flash 8 or something.

 

[LuN3yDaV3]

You open the site from your Droid. When the flash message pops up hit cancel. Select your location on the left of the page. Choose stream, select winamp from dropdown menu, push speaker icon.

 

[bbtkd]

It's kind of funny...

I live in the largest railroad hub in the nation. I have a scanner programmed with all of the AAR frequencies the railroads use, but I would love to have it on my Droid, just for the convenience.

I'm guessing that if you became a feed provider you'd need a scanner for each frequency and that one scanner wouldn't work. For that matter, I'd think you'd need a separate soundcard (computer?) for each one too!

He wouldn't need to dedicate a scanner and feed to each frequency. You'd only need to do that if one or more of the channels is active a majority of the time or if you really need to separate them because traffic is too confusing. Most feeds include multiple agencies, for instance police, fire, ems, etc for a given area. You can set up two feeds into on microphone input by using left and right channels. Then when you set up the feeds you note that. If you had to add a third or fourth you could use "line in". After that you would need another audio card.

 

[TimChgo9]

It's kind of funny...

I live in the largest railroad hub in the nation. I have a scanner programmed with all of the AAR frequencies the railroads use, but I would love to have it on my Droid, just for the convenience.

I'm guessing that if you became a feed provider you'd need a scanner for each frequency and that one scanner wouldn't work. For that matter, I'd think you'd need a separate soundcard (computer?) for each one too!

He wouldn't need to dedicate a scanner and feed to each frequency. You'd only need to do that if one or more of the channels is active a majority of the time or if you really need to separate them because traffic is too confusing. Most feeds include multiple agencies, for instance police, fire, ems, etc for a given area. You can set up two feeds into on microphone input by using left and right channels. Then when you set up the feeds you note that. If you had to add a third or fourth you could use "line in". After that you would need another audio card.

Around here, the RR channels are pretty active. The BNSF main past my house (161.100) is probably the 3rd most active channel on my scanner (Chicago FD being the first two) after that is the Union Pacific, and the IHB. I think if I were to become a stream provider, I would have to have a different feed for each channel, because the channels are so busy. To combine the three channels would be confusing.

 

[coondogg97]

I am just repeating myself at this point, but this app is great. With the updates I find it FAR better then the iPod Touch app I used to use. Kudos to the developer for the constant updates!

 

[bbtkd]

I am just repeating myself at this point, but this app is great. With the updates I find it FAR better then the iPod Touch app I used to use. Kudos to the developer for the constant updates!

I agree. I was just playing with the latest release and the drill down method to find feeds works great.

 

[J. Dub]

This app is good stuff.

 

[coondogg97]

The Top 30 feature is great, but I wish you could select the stations. New Orleans police is the #1 station, but it doesn't seem to be listed in the normal list.

 

[susanc33]

I have this app

I have this app and love it! I can listen to any police scanner in the world even my local scanner! It is a free app!