Hi everyone! 👋 Remember I wrote a post recently about how you can listen to your local police department using a Baofeng? As it turns out, most police and fire departments have moved to trunked radio. Trunked radio is just a fancy way of saying that these departments have gone digital. A Baofeng UV-5X3 or UV-5R radio can not decode this communication.

You have two options. You will either have to buy an expensive radio from Motorolla or Kenwood that supports digital modes or you can use a $25-$35 RTL-SDR. I made a short video to guide you through the whole process of ordering an RTL-SDR, finding the frequency of your local PD, and setting everything up in the SDRTrunk software.

Links mentioned in the video:

• Baofeng UV-5R: https://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-UV-5R-Dual-Radio-Black/dp/B007H4VT7A
• RTL-SDR bundle: https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Defined/dp/B011HVUEME
• SDRTrunk: https://github.com/DSheirer/sdrtrunk/releases
• Radio Reference: https://www.radioreference.com/

If you have any questions please post them either here or on YouTube. I am also relatively new to this but I will try to answe as many of your questions as possible. I am planning on putting out more videos on my YouTube channel so make sure you don’t forget to subscribe. I will see you in the next post.

Take care! 👋 ❤️