Going further

The console gets you a long way, but GopherTrunk has more under the hood. This guide is for when you’re ready to open the config file and a terminal — to run more than one dongle, decode paging, discover a system you don’t have details for, and reach the console from your phone.

Before you start. This builds on Everyday basics — you should already be comfortable driving the web console and shaping talkgroups.

The config file

Everything GopherTrunk does is described by one file, config.yaml. You have two ways to edit it, and you can mix them freely:

  • Config Builder — the guided, browser-based editor you met in Get started. Best for adding systems and talkgroups without learning the YAML layout. It can also pull systems in from a RadioReference PDF or CSV — see Import (PDF / CSV).
  • By hand — open config.yaml in any text editor. Once you know the layout, this is the fastest way to reach the settings the builder doesn’t surface.

Many edits apply without a restart. On Linux and macOS you can also send the daemon a SIGHUP to reload the file on the fly, and small tweaks made in the console write straight back to the file — both covered in Live edits.

Run more than one dongle

A single dongle follows one control channel and records one call at a time. Add a second (or third) dongle and GopherTrunk records several calls at once and keeps watching the control channel while it does. Each dongle gets a role:

  • control — stays parked on the control channel.
  • voice — tunes to call frequencies as grants come in.
  • auto — let GopherTrunk decide based on the pool.

On a system with two timeslots (DMR), a voice dongle can capture both slots as separate recordings. Getting clean decodes also means calibrating each dongle — its frequency error (PPM) and gain. The Hardware guide covers dongle-by-dongle gain and PPM advice; if you’re on Windows, the Windows user guide walks through the driver and device steps.

One dongle, many channels

If you’d rather cover several carriers with a single dongle, the wideband channelizer digitally slices one wide chunk of spectrum into multiple receivers — you can even mix protocols inside the same window. It’s a more advanced allocation; the Architecture reference explains how the tuner pool and channelizer fit together.

Name your channels and radios

GopherTrunk reads alias files — CSV or JSON — that map raw numbers to friendly names:

  • Talkgroup aliases turn 1001 into “City Dispatch”, and carry the scan, lockout, priority, and stream flags per channel.
  • Radio ID (RID) aliases name individual radios. Paired with the live affiliation tracker, you can follow exactly who’s on the air — see Radio IDs.

RadioReference exports drop straight in through the Import workflow, so you rarely type these by hand.

Paging and tone alerts

GopherTrunk decodes more than trunked voice:

  • Paging — turn on the POCSAG and FLEX decoders to log pager traffic, including a wideband mode that catches several pagers on one dongle.
  • Tone-out alerts — detect Motorola Quick Call II two-tone pages (the fire/EMS dispatch tones) and raise an alert, scoped to the systems and talkgroups you choose.

These and the other opt-in receivers — along with exactly which defaults apply — are catalogued in Opt-in features.

Discover an unknown system

Don’t have the control-channel frequency or protocol for a system near you? Hunt scans the band, finds trunked control channels, identifies the protocol and system IDs, and hands you a ready-to-use config block (it can even prepare a RadioReference submission). Full workflow in Hunt.

Reach the console from your phone

So far the console has been on the same machine as the daemon. To open it from a laptop, tablet, or phone elsewhere on your network — the classic “headless Raspberry Pi in the closet, watch from the couch” setup — you’ll bind the daemon to your network and turn on authentication so only you can reach it. Do this deliberately: Hardening covers passwords, tokens, trusted networks, and TLS.

Where to go next

You can now run a multi-dongle setup, decode paging, name everything, find systems on your own, and operate over the network. The last guide opens up the power-user surface — the terminal cockpit, signal scopes, offline analysis, the other receivers (aircraft, boats, packet), and the APIs:

Next up → Advanced & power-user features