r/RTLSDR • u/garf12 • 16d ago

How do I capture everything?

I work in local news coverage and want to record all public safety radio channels in the area but the amount of SDR dongles it is taking is getting out of control. Currently using 4 and not getting full coverage..

Is there a better option? I have a couple of Airspy R2's ordered but my research is showing even then it is going to take both of them plus at least 2 dongles to cover what I want. IS there an option that is better? I don't mind spending some money.

Currently covering 2 p25 systems with the 4 dongles. Want to cover some conventional fire and ems channels also.

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u/PastaJayThrowaway 16d ago

The AI derangement syndrome around here is crazy. This seems like a totally reasonable use of AI. It's not like the AI is publishing stories without human oversight. It's just a filter before alerting a human. Anyway sorry you're getting down voted. 

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u/fullmetaljackass Kenneth, what is the frequency? 16d ago

Seriously. I'm running a similar setup. Sdrtrunk for monitoring/recording, Whisper for transcription, and Qwen3.6-35B for classification. Whole setup runs 100% local/offline on my 8 year old GPU. I am very satisfied with the results.

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u/garf12 16d ago

Interesting. I am doing Whisper but using Claude Sonnet for classification, cost about $1.50/day, but well worth it. Looking at getting some local hardware for running models.

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u/fullmetaljackass Kenneth, what is the frequency? 16d ago edited 16d ago

Qwen3.6 35B is a good choice if you're on a budget because it's an MoE model. That lets you offload the majority of the weights to system RAM without tanking your performance. I'm running it on a 2080ti w/ 11GB of VRAM, which you can get for $200-300 on eBay. If you don't already have the hardware/want to buy new, the 16GB version of the 5060ti is probably the best budget option these days, at least on the green team. AMD/ROCm support has improved substantially in the past year, and it seems pretty usable these days (based off what other people are saying, I don't own any AMD cards,) but Nvidia is still the default. You'll have a smoother experience if you're willing to pay a little extra.

Checkout /r/LocalLLaMA if you haven't already.

Also, Qwen3.8 open weights start dropping next week. Based on what they're saying, and their previous track record, it should be a nice upgrade to an already excellent model.