ABOUT

What?

This site hosts an audio archive of emergency service radio traffic in the Salina Kansas / Saline County area.

Audio is merged into 5 minute groups with silence removed to make reviewing the archive easier.

Why?

I created this archive for three reasons.

  1. To provide a free option for those who cannot afford the new digital trunking radios required to listen to local emergency radio traffic.
  2. To provide the ability to 'rewind' and hear radio traffic that was missed.
  3. To provide a record of radio traffic for review.
Once the switch to digital was complete, many people were left without a solid solution for listening to emergency radio traffic. Online streaming systems have added support for the new digital system now, but there are still times when these systems fail or miss pieces of the conversations either because of missing talk groups or drop-outs due to performance issues on their servers. One benefit of this archive over other options is that the non-live audio is stripped of all silence. This makes listening and 'catching up' much faster as you only listen to actual speaking activity.

Even before the swich to the new digital system, I thought about building this archive because many times I would be curious about sirens I heard close to me, but since I hadn't already been listening to a radio, I had already missed the initial call. By the time I could grab a radio, I would have missed key details or even the entire event.

Most valuably though, having a record of radio traffic can help retrace events and clarify misinformation. Often times the "game of telephone" is a very real problem and having the actual audio to refer back to can save a lot of arguing.

I hope this archive benefits others as much as it has benefited me. I do this entirely on my own time and pay for all costs out of my own pocket. If you feel like helping, anything is welcome and I thank you in advance for your generocity!

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How?

Short version: The current version of this archive has been updated to utilize a Software Defined Radio (SDR) device. This is a USB device that allows for simultainious capture of many radio conversations at the same time. Previously, a physical scanner was used and limited the capture to one or two conversations at once.

The captured audio is then sorted, tagged, and indexed on this site for review.