Everyday basics

You’ve got GopherTrunk running and your first call in the history list. This page is the next step: the everyday skills for operating a scanner you’ve already set up — all from the web console, no command line, no config files.

Before you start. This page assumes you’ve finished Get started and have one system recording. If a control channel isn’t locking and calls aren’t appearing, go back there first.

A tour of the console

Everything you do lives in the browser console the daemon opens for you. The panels along the top (or the bottom on a phone) are different views of the same running scanner. The five you’ll use most:

Dashboard — your home base. Live event feed, the audio controls, and an at-a-glance health readout.
Active — every call happening right now, with a live timer. This is the panel to watch when a system is busy.
History — the searchable call log. Filter by talkgroup, time, or system to find a call you missed.
Systems — the trunked systems you’ve added and whether each one is locked.
Talkgroups — the channels within a system: dispatch, tactical, fireground, and so on.

The full panel-by-panel reference is the Web console guide.

Listening and playback

GopherTrunk records calls whether or not your speakers are on, so there are two ways to listen:

Live. The audio cockpit at the top of the Dashboard plays calls as they happen. Set the volume, mute, or toggle recording from there. (On a phone or tablet you tap once to enable audio — a browser rule, not a GopherTrunk one.)
From history. Open any past call in the History panel and play it back. Every recording is saved with its talkgroup and timestamp, so you can always go back and re-listen.

Tidy up your talkgroups

Out of the box GopherTrunk follows everything a system carries. Once you know which channels you actually care about, the Talkgroups panel lets you shape what you hear:

Scan / lockout — lock out a talkgroup to skip it entirely (data channels, test ranges, the chatty ones you don’t want).
Priority — mark the important channels so they’re easy to spot.
Record / mute — record keeps writing a talkgroup’s calls to disk; mute keeps it recording but silences it in the live player. Handy for a busy channel you want logged but not blaring.

Changes you make here save on their own and mostly take effect without a restart — see Live edits.

Bookmarks and Radio IDs

Two more panels round out day-to-day use:

Bookmarks — save interesting frequencies and jump back to them later.
Radio IDs — see which radio is talking, not just which talkgroup. GopherTrunk tracks each radio’s recent activity, and you can attach a friendly name (alias) to the ones you recognise.

Scan more than one system

You’re not limited to a single system. Add more from the Config Builder (the same guided editor from Get started), and GopherTrunk will hunt across them. The scan mode decides how much it follows:

All — follow every call on every system (the default).
List — follow only the talkgroups you’ve put on your scan list, so a busy system doesn’t drown out the channels you came for.

Want others to hear what you hear? From the Settings panel you can stream your calls out to the popular aggregators — Broadcastify Calls, RdioScanner, or OpenMHz — by pasting in the credentials they give you. GopherTrunk handles the encoding and upload. (The finer controls — per-system and per-talkgroup filtering, live Icecast/ShoutCast mountpoints — are covered in the next guide.)

Where to go next

You can now run GopherTrunk as a scanner day to day. When you’re ready to go beyond the console — multiple dongles, paging alerts, discovering unknown systems, and opening the console to your phone — keep going:

Next up → Going further (Intermediate)