How to listen to West Michigan police & fire scanners

Ottawa County, Kent County and Grand Rapids public safety agencies talk on Michigan's statewide digital radio system, MPSCS. Here are the three ways to listen, from easiest to most involved, including how 616 Dispatch built its own receiver.

1. A scanner app or website

The quickest way: volunteer listeners stream West Michigan dispatch audio online, and scanner apps for phones play those streams. Search a scanner app or Broadcastify for "Ottawa County" or "Kent County". Coverage depends on the volunteers, so streams come and go, and audio is often delayed.

2. A digital trunking scanner

MPSCS is a P25 Phase II trunked system, so an older analog scanner won't hear it. You need a digital trunking scanner that decodes P25 Phase II, such as the Uniden SDS100, SDS200, BCD436HP or BCD536HP, or the Whistler TRX-1 or TRX-2. Program it with the MPSCS site that covers your county and the fire and EMS talkgroups you want; the RadioReference database lists them.

Many police talkgroups are encrypted. No scanner can decode encrypted traffic, so what you hear is mostly fire, EMS and some public works.

3. Build your own receiver (what 616 Dispatch does)

616 Dispatch's calls come from its own receiver in West Michigan: a Raspberry Pi 5 with three inexpensive RTL-SDR USB radios and a simple antenna sized for the 700 and 800 MHz bands MPSCS uses. One radio follows the system's control channel, which announces each transmission's frequency, and the others record the voice channels. The free, open-source program trunk-recorder does the decoding and saves each transmission as a short audio file.

From there, 616 Dispatch transcribes each recording, picks out the dispatch details (the town, the block, the call type and the units sent), removes names and house numbers, and posts the call. That's why a call can appear here within a couple of minutes of being dispatched, and why it reads like a call log rather than audio.

A single RTL-SDR only covers about 2.4 MHz at once, and an MPSCS site spreads its channels wider than that, so plan on two to four of them, a powered USB hub and a good antenna up high.

Is it legal?

Listening to public safety radio at home is generally legal in the United States. Michigan restricts police-frequency radios in vehicles (MCL 750.508), and using what you hear to commit a crime is illegal everywhere. Check the law before mounting a scanner in a car; this isn't legal advice.

Or just read it here

616 Dispatch lists every call it hears or that dispatch publishes, updated every minute: the Ottawa County scanner, the Kent County scanner and Grand Rapids. Hear something you don't understand? Look it up in scanner codes and radio terms.