RailRoadFan.com

As I go driving around, I am finding more and more railroad channels that have gone "digital" and so my scanner will not receive them other than a buzzing sound. As I understand it, the entire railroad industry is under an FCC mandate to move to "very narrow band" digital radio over the next 5-7 years. The Association of American Railroads has dictated that the railroads use what is called the "NXDN" encoding protocol for digital radio. All of the radio police channels around Detroit are now digital. I was down in Elkhart, Indiana a week ago and was surprised to learn that most of their yard operations are now done on digital channels. There was a move directed by the FCC a couple years back to go from "wideband" channels to "narrowband" channels. Since the conversion involved buying new radio equipment, some of the smarter railroads simply skipped the "narrowband" step and went directly to the digital "very narrowband" step. So, it is becoming pretty obvious to me that if I want to continue to listen in, I am going to have to fork out a few bucks from my pocket for a new scanner. The one I have is so old, anyway, that it belongs in the Smithsonian.

Does anyone know of any manufacturer that makes a scanner that can receive the railroad NXDN digital channels?

There is not yet an FCC mandate for the so-called "Ultra-Narrow-banding", but it is coming. It isn't just for the AAR channels, but for the entire business spectrum.

No scanner is yet available that can decode NXDN. The only options are to buy an NXDN radio, or I've heard that you can use a laptop with a software defined radio receiver. I am not positive about the latter, but I've heard it is possible.

If the signal is encrypted on top of being NDXN; I doubt you could ever listen in without the railroad's knowledge and permission.

You might want to check out this Web site, and subscribe to their forums. There's a lot of valuable information about NXDN at this site:

https://www.nxdn-forum.com/

Dear god, this again?