Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)

A few months ago when there was a lot of emergency services activity in my area and I didn't know why, I was reminded that no-one in my region is contributing a feed to Broadcastify.

I went down the tunnel of using SDR to recieve those transmissions, and share them online.

Then I went a bit further.

What if you could transcribe the broadcasts into something like a text feed? What if you could add location information somehow to monitor where things were going on in your region? Could you use AI to somehow organize the data into a more useful format?

What if this data was valuable? Maybe you could sell this as a service? Who would buy it? Public safety organizations? Hospitals? News organizations?

I spent a few days worth of freetime figuring out how you'd do someting like this, and got to a place where I figured it was conceptually possible.

Then somewhere in my googling, I stumbled across this site: http://citizen.com/ - and realized that someone had already turned my idea into what looks like a pretty mature product.

Ahh well. I'm sure my billion dollar idea will come later.

In the meantime, I'd still like to mess with SDR at least so I can know what's going on around me next time there's a fire or other public safety incident, before it gets reported on.

I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.

If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!

But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.

Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!

I was joking about the billion dollar idea.

My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.

Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.

But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.

I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.

One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...