Lesson 24 of 31 intermediate 5 min read

Audio feeds & streaming

Key takeaways A feed puts your local scanner audio on the internet for anyone to hear. The chain is simple: your receiver decodes audio, an encoder compresses and pushes it to a feed provider like Broadcastify, and the provider relays it to every listener. Running a feed is a small broadcasting responsibility — keep it reliable and identified, and stay inside the law and the provider’s rules (no encrypted traffic, delays where required). It’s the same care the legal & ethical lesson stresses, applied to sharing rather than just listening.

Most people who have “listened to a scanner” have never owned one — they heard it on a phone app, streamed by a volunteer somewhere with a receiver and an internet connection. Those volunteers run feeds, and it’s one of the most social things you can do in the hobby: your rooftop antenna becomes something the whole world can tune to. This lesson explains how a feed works and what running one responsibly asks of you.

The streaming chain

A live feed is ordinary internet radio, and it has three links:

Source — your receiver produces decoded audio, exactly as if you were listening. For a trunked system that’s the followed voice channel; for a conventional channel it’s whatever the squelch opens on.
Encoder — software on your computer compresses that audio into a streaming codec (MP3 or AAC, at a modest bitrate) and pushes it to the provider’s server. This is the same job an internet-radio broadcaster’s encoder does.
Provider / server — a service like Broadcastify receives your single stream and fans it out to everyone listening, so you upload once no matter how many people tune in. The provider also hosts the directory, the web player, and the phone apps.

You supply the first two links and a stable internet connection; the provider supplies the third. Your upstream bandwidth only ever carries one copy of the stream, which is why even a modest home connection can feed thousands of listeners.

Broadcastify and feed providers

Broadcastify is the dominant public feed directory, grown out of the same RadioReference community that maintains the system database. Volunteers stream their local audio to its servers, and it hosts thousands of feeds that anyone can browse by location and listen to free. When you apply to run a feed, you typically pick the system or area it covers, get stream credentials, point your encoder at their server, and appear in the directory once it’s live.

Other providers and self-hosted options exist — you can run your own Icecast server and publish a stream yourself — but for reach and discoverability, a shared directory is where the listeners already are. The trade-off is that a directory imposes its own rules on top of the law, which is the next thing to get right.

Doing it responsibly

Putting audio on the air, even relayed, is a small broadcasting responsibility, and feeds live or die on trust. A few duties come with it:

Respect the law first. Whether you may receive and re-share a given transmission depends on where you are; receiving unencrypted traffic is broadly permitted in many places, but not everywhere, and legality of receiving is not legality of every use. Revisit legal & ethical scanning before you publish anything.
Never stream encrypted traffic even if you could — providers forbid it and it serves no one, since it decodes to noise anyway.
Follow the provider’s channel rules. Many require a broadcast delay or exclude sensitive channels (tactical talkgroups, phone patches) to avoid interfering with operations or exposing personal information.
Keep it clean and identified. A good feed is a stable, well-labelled stream of the system it claims to carry — not a mix of half-tuned channels drifting in and out.

The guiding idea is the hobby’s oldest: receive freely, act responsibly. A feed amplifies both — reaching more people and carrying more responsibility for what those people hear.

Reliability is the real work

The technical setup is a one-evening job; keeping the feed up is the ongoing one. Listeners rely on it, and a feed that drops out during the one big incident of the month is the feed nobody trusts again. Reliability means the boring things: a receiver and computer that run unattended, an encoder that reconnects automatically when the network hiccups, and a machine that comes back on its own after a power blip.

That’s precisely the always-on discipline the monitoring-post lesson is about, and a public feed is one of the best reasons to build a post properly. If people are counting on your audio, “I’ll restart it when I get home” isn’t good enough.

Quick check: when a thousand people listen to your feed, how many copies of the stream does your connection upload?

Recap

A feed streams your local scanner audio to the internet through a source → encoder → provider chain, the same as internet radio.
The provider (commonly Broadcastify) fans out your single uploaded stream to every listener, so your bandwidth carries just one copy.
Streaming is sharing, which carries duties: obey the law, never stream encrypted traffic, follow the provider’s channel rules and delays.
Keep the feed clean, labelled, and identified — feeds run on the trust of the people listening.
Reliability is the ongoing job; a public feed is a strong reason to build a proper monitoring post.

Next up: alerting on the calls you care about.

Frequently asked questions

How does a live scanner feed work?

Your receiver decodes audio as usual, an encoder on your computer compresses it into a streaming format and sends it to a feed provider’s server, and the provider relays that stream to everyone listening on the web or an app. It’s the same chain as any internet radio station — a source encoder pushing to a streaming server that fans the audio out to many listeners.

What is Broadcastify?

Broadcastify is the largest public directory of live scanner audio feeds, an outgrowth of the RadioReference community. Volunteers run receivers and stream their local audio to Broadcastify’s servers, which host thousands of feeds that anyone can listen to on the web or a phone app. It’s how most people hear scanner traffic without owning a scanner.

Is streaming a scanner feed legal?

In many places receiving and sharing unencrypted radio is legal, but the rules vary by country and even by state, and legality of receiving is not the same as legality of every use. Feed providers also impose their own rules — commonly no encrypted traffic and delays on sensitive channels. Check the law where you are and the provider’s terms before you stream, the same care the legal-and-ethical lesson stresses.