One of my favorite features of Uniden BCDx36- and SDS- series radios is the ability to enable a favorites list and let the radio record continuously for days or weeks.
This feature is very effective for discovering activity on new systems, digging through frequencies found in the FCC database to determine what’s being used, or quickly getting a read on which ham radio repeaters are active in a given area – all without being in front of the radio all day.
It also pairs very well with the “negative delay” feature, which lets you make sure that a dead carrier or trunked system control channel won’t tie up your radio and storage space for more than 10 seconds before it moves on.
The downside is that it’s easy to just let the radio sit recording for weeks on end, leading to a large pile of recordings that can be time-consuming to sift through, even with tools like Universal Scanner Audio Player.
To that end, I built a proof-of-concept tool in Perl that can dig through a folder full of WAV files, collate them by frequency/tone, attempt to transcribe them using a local instance of OpenAI Whisper, and provide an easy-to-read HTML page showing the transcriptions, timestamps, and easy access to the recording audio.
I’ve posted the example code on Github and will probably continue to add features to it.
This project depends on the excellent work from Bearcatter, whose wavparse Go library makes it possible to extract Uniden-specific metadata from WAV files.
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