This is information for the Salina area radio scanners I operate, how the system works, and how to access things.
I created this scanner mostly for my own use. I enjoy the challenge of setting up the systems and I wanted a system I could rely on without the need for third-party sites or services.
Sharing the data is an easy thing to do, and with the complexities of a large trunked radio system, a good number of folks are simply unable to set these things up themselves.
I also share ADS-B aircraft data and plan on adding Airband and other Amateur Radio streams.
I stream the scanners to a few external sites that you can use to access things. I don’t offer direct access to the scanners as the third-party sites are able to scale and handle spikes in folks tuning in for larger events much better than my local machines.
The live audio feed is available for free on the sites below. If you’re looking for past radio traffic, OpenMHz is the only free site below that has it available. Broadcastify requires a premium subscription for any past audio.
https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/968
If you’re just looking for the most simple scanner interface, the Broadcastify feeds are easy to use. Each feed will have a preselected group of talkgroups (channels) and play everything automatically.
Here are the pages for each feed:
These are the same feeds that are in apps like Scanner Radio.
If you use an app or the Advanced Web Player, you will also see Alpha Tags coming through that show what talkgroup is active during each call.
https://openmhz.com/system/ksicssal
OpenMHz is a free site with access to each talkgroup seen by the system. When you first load the page, you can select a group of talkgroups to listen to such as Saline County, Kansas Highway Patrol, etc. You can also choose to listen to All Calls, but on busy days you may fall behind with new calls.
You can also select specific talkgroups by using the “Filter” button in the top left, or see past calls with the “Archive” button in the top right. Toggling “Autoplay” in the bottom left will control if new calls are automatically played as they are received.
You can look at recent calls by just scrolling down on the page, or for more distant calls you can use the “Archive” button in the top right.
OpenMHz also supports sending unknown talkgroups, which appear as just the ID number rather than a channel name. Some are not published and marked as “Unknown” in their name, but others just are not often seen and not imported into the software.
https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/968 under “Calls Coverage”
This operates similar to OpenMHz where you can see individual talkgroups. You can also see traffic from other parts of the state on KSICS through this interface.
I don’t listen via this site often, so I can’t walk you through well.
https://www.youtube.com/@andrewkester7797/streams
During some events like fire weather or winter storms, I’ll stream to my YouTube channel. These are short lived and for specific events right now, though I may do a 24/7 stream in the future.
If there’s an active stream, it will appear in the streams tab on my channel.
I’ll cater this to the level of radio dork you are. But none of the below is generally needed if you just plan on casually listening.
A common misconception or complaint is that all the traffic is now encrypted. This is generally not the case in Saline County, all day-to-day operations such as Law and Fire dispatch are unencrypted.
Some talkgroups are marked as always encrypted, and those are typically used for personal information such as records or ambulance to hospital traffic. Some other talkgroups may be encrypted for sensitive operations, such as police standoffs.
The nature of the Salina transmitters, though, also causes issues with a lot of digital scanners as well. See “Boring Details / Multisite” below.
The system is a Project 25 Trunked Radio System. Trunked systems broadcast digital data to coordinate transmissions and facilitate advanced features the radios can make use of. My systems are listening to the KSICS system, which is a statewide radio system used by a number of agencies.
Usually only talkgroups local to Saline County are heard, but depending on various circumstances distant traffic from other parts of the state can be heard. If you’re using OpenMHz, you should be able to see these distant talkgroups and listen to them. See “Talkgroups” for more details.
The scanners themselves are listening to all talkgroups at all times, and will record almost every call that comes through. This prevents calls from being covered by other transmissions, which is an issue on some other feeds. If multiple calls come in, they just get queued and played sequentially on the audio feeds.
(I’m not an expert on these systems, so these details may be sparse or explained poorly)
KSICS uses a multi-site approach with broadcast towers, which provides great coverage but doesn’t work with a number of less expensive digital receivers. Multiple towers are used on the same frequency and broadcast the same data at the same time.
As the RF signal moves from each tower, it arrives at the scanner at slightly different times based on how far away each tower is, and this causes the signals to interfere with themselves. All but a few expensive scanners are unable to handle this interference which raises the bar to listen even higher.
This system runs on a Raspberry Pi with a few support computers that perform other heavy tasks. The antenna is a no-name Cell Booster antenna off Amazon with coverage in the 800MHz band and an Airspy Mini SDR. These are mounted in the attic and are near one of the transmitter sites of the system.
The entire system is on a UPS that provides around 3 hours of runtime, and a generator is onsite that can provide longer run time as needed. The site has redundant internet feeds and an almost fully redundant network stack, save for the Pi itself.
KSICS has a lot of talkgroups, but not all can be heard on this scanner. Some talkgroups are broadcast all the time, but others are only broadcast when a radio in the area is requesting it.
As an example, normally Hutchinson Fire isn’t heard in Salina. If a radio in the Salina area tunes to the Hutchinson Fire talkgroup, though, it will start to be broadcast until the radio leaves the area or is turned off. The scanner cannot transmit, so it can’t communicate and send the request to the controller to bring these talkgroups in.
Some neighboring counties are routinely heard on the Saline County system, but due to changes or circumstances beyond my control, they disappear for a few days. There’s nothing I can do in these cases, but these systems often aren’t streamed elsewhere so I stream them as something is often better than nothing.
If you’re using OpenMHz or Brodcastify Calls, you can see these talkgroups even when they aren’t assigned a category or shared via another stream.
This is a quirk of how the software operates and can sound somewhat unnatural at first.
When a call is broadcast, the software will start recording, wait for it to finish, then process the file by uploading and streaming it. Consider this audio sample:
The first two short messages were broadcast, completed, and streamed all within a few seconds, so no gap was heard. The long call, however, had to be completed before it could be streamed. In reality, it was taking place during the pause in the stream but since it was not yet complete, it was not streamed.
A similar issue can happen with very short transmissions:
In reality, the order was 3, 1, 4, 2 but they got jumbled in the stream.
These were fast enough that the recorder didn’t actually return to an idle state and stream the recording. Since these two radios broadcast, stopped, then started again quickly it’s treated as a single recording (as often it really is a single call). Since they ended at the same time, it’s a race to see which file is written first and streamed, causing the jumbled order.
Dispatchers will often broadcast on multiple channels at the same time. When they do this, our system will hear the transmission on each talkgroup and stream it in the audio file multiple times.
These can’t be easily filtered as these can be added on-the-fly have the potential to strip the recording from some of the streams it would normally go to.
Yes and yes. The public airwaves are … public and anyone can listen in. This has gotten more difficult with digital radio systems, but this isn’t an outright stop to all scanners.
Any traffic that is encrypted on this system can’t be decoded, and agencies around Salina can (and will) encrypt traffic as needed. Protocols are in place in the agency for when encryption should be used, and scanners cannot decrypt any of that traffic.
In casual conversation with folks who work with the system, the understanding is that any unencrypted traffic is OK to be public knowledge by virtue of it being unencrypted. If things are not encrypted that should be encrypted, that’s the fault of the agencies and not the fault of folks listening on scanners.