ALRUG GMRS Repeater Recorder

January 15, 2026 - Reading time: 3 minutes

There are times when a radio operator wants to hear how their radio sounds on a repeater with different antennas, or maybe with different mic gain settings. Perhaps you want to hear how you sound from different rooms in your house?

I've hosted scanner feeds on Broadcastify.com for several years to give people access to something that's usually gatekept behind expensive equipment and technical know-how. With public safety systems going encrypted and my scanners starting to sit idle, I wanted to do something useful for our GMRS repeater group and provide a recorded feed of the repeater. You can go on Broadcastify.com and stream feeds from many popular HAM repeater systems from around the country. When I looked into setting up a Broadcastify feed for the Altamont Livermore Repeater User's Group to use, I was disappointed to learn that Broadcastify.com specifically forbids setting up feeds for GMRS repeaters.

Oh well...

I have a background in IT Infrastructure and Cloud Services Operations, so why not roll our own? I grabbed a spare Pi 4 4GB model, installed Raspbian OS on it, plugged in a $4 USB soundcard from Amazon and a special radio K-plug to 1/8" audio cable that allowed me to use an inexpensive Baofeng AR-5RM radio tuned into the repeater's output frequency and CTCSS code. Works great, takes up very little power, and has plenty of horsepower leftover to run the webpage our club can access to use it.

When I used to run feeds for Broadcastify, I used almost the exact same hardware (Pi, same $4 USB soundcard), but had a trunk-tracking Bearcat scanner as the receiver. The hardware is proven reliable, so then I just needed a software solution. There are some cool projects out there, but they're either too heavy for my Pi, too complicated for my purposes, or just required so much modification to wedge into my use case that I may as well roll my own. That's what I did.

The only real dependencies are the vox and sox Linux libraries, and some libs to support generating MP3s. The rest is a bash script turned into a Linux service, a cron job, and a one-page PHP site that Gemini helped me write that just lists everything in the MP3 directory on the Pi out on a nice web interface.

I'm in the process of migrating all of my websites (2 left to go) back to my homelab, but once my homelab site is migrated I'll post the script and build-doc in case anybody wants to use it or make it cooler.

I like it, the club seems to like it. I'm calling it a success. :)

73!

-G