Blotter, a live map of police radio activity
Details
- External ID
- 47977944
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Blotter, a live map of LAPD radio activity
- Website domain
- blotter.fm
- Launched
- May 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4894991922455573
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Hacker News clients, datasets, and tools
- Vertical
- Government
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- real-time police dispatch activity map
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Capturing and transcribing live police radio across jurisdictions requires specialized hardware (SDRs/scanners), distributed audio streaming pipelines, and domain-tuned audio-to-text models that understand radio jargon and noisy frequencies.
What it would actually take: Requires ingest infra connecting to software-defined radio networks (Broadcastify/OpenMHz feeds or physical RTL-SDR clusters), real-time Whisper/ASR pipelines fine-tuned on police dispatch acoustic jargon and 10-codes, and automated NLP entity extraction mapped onto a geospatial GIS database (PostGIS) for real-time map rendering.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: More metro cities/metros beyond current support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 117 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #62 of 118 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 181 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Digital-Forensics-Lab-Experiments · github · 2026-09-23 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A crowdsourced map of surveillance camera's based on OSM · hn · 2026-06-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Baltic shadow fleet tracker · hn · 2026-03-20 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.