Why do people have to change things all the time. This looks like a profit move in order to get people to sign up to their premium service. So, what has Broadcastify done that's so bad. Well, they have destroyed the user experience by making the feed automatically and continuously stop after around 9 - 10 minutes of listening to a live feed. Actually, it looks like the duration increases by around 1 minute the longer a user listens before the feed stops. Not to mention they are now including ads to the start of the feeds.
Sometimes I would listen to a feed while doing other things online, but this has kind of made that harder to do. Everytime there is a quiet spot in the feed (no police activity / crime reports over the air) I'm paranoid that the feed has automatically stopped again. And most the time I'm right. This is a terrible move by Broadcastify and makes me not want to listen anymore.
This desperate move will certainly not get me to sign up to premium. It's quite annoying. And when something has become annoying, the last thing I would do is give the people who are causing the annoyance money. May as well just buy my own radio scanner!
I love the old radio scanners. Back in the day there was so much to listen to. Cordless phones and live Police frequencies being right at the top of the list for a lot of people. But now, especially in the UK, most of the radio communications have gone digital, which now leaves the old analogue scanners unable to pick up those signals.
But there's a lot of country's that haven't gone digital just yet, and that's what this post is about. As well as there being new ways to listen to scanner frequencies, such as SDR radio, where you typically need an RTL-SDR receiver dongle. These can be picked up on eBay, but obviously you do need to buy it.
The free alternative is to listen for free online. There are many websites that offer this service, but the one that I use is https://www.broadcastify.com/. You can't listen to the UK Police because their communications are now encrypted. But you can listen to many other countries that are still analogue. I listen to USA mostly. In some of the areas where there is a lot of drama, so there's a lot of action to listen to.
Places like Philadelphia, Chicago (Districts 10 and 11 which covers, North Lawndale, South Lawndale, and the Lower West Side; 11th District - Harrison: Serving West Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, and the southern half of Humboldt Park), New Jersey, Detroit and many more. You can listen directly to Chicago Districts 10 and 11 here (Link removed due to Broadcastify removing the feed).
