Comment by ryandrake

I didn’t think it would work either, but prompts like “Analyze the signal at 458.25MHz and determine the digital encoding” were all it took. Claude knew how to use the suite of rtl-sdr command line tools, and wrote throwaway Python scripts to analyze the captured data looking for modulation schemes, codec rates, estimating channel bandwidth, and so on. It was actually pretty impressive.

With some help, it downloaded the fcc licensor databases and ingested them into a SQLite database, which allowed it to identify voice frequencies that correspond to an identified control channel.

You can then use tools like dsd-fme to decode and playback digital voice channels and scan entire trunk systems. I’ve been having a blast lately and learning a lot.