North Central Iowa Scanner System - NCISS

07/26/2026

JPD and GCSO involved in a pursuit early this morning, with an officer getting stabbed and shots fired. More information over in the NCISS Discussion Group. R1 TAC 12 patched to the Greene County stream. Members can scroll back in the recordings to pick up the traffic; everything started around 0124 this morning.

07/11/2026

Polk County (Urbandale, I believe) is working a fire on SR1 - TAC112. You can follow along on our R1 TAC stream.

07/06/2026

The system has been running along smoothly for the past week. I'm actively looking at a couple of different sites for the first remote feed. One is in the Waterloo area, one is south of Des Moines. I'll have more information on that as either of them finalize out. Also - I started a new page for my Greene County followers: http://www.greenecountyweather.com

I am a true weather geek. Have been since I was a pre-teen. With the advent of 21st century technology, home assistant, and vibe coding, I was able to put together some awesome pages in my Home Assistant system to take a deeper dive into what make the weather turn severe. Then - just like NCISS - I wanted to take that on the road with me, so GCWX was born.

Folks who don't live in Greene County might not find it useful. Greene County residents might, though. And if not, I'll at least use it when I'm away from home. Free to use, and it's still in its infancy stage. Many more things to add to it over the coming week or two.

Greene County, Iowa weather, tracked obsessively. Not an official NWS source.

06/27/2026

A couple of updates and reminders:

1) I went out for a birthday dinner last night in Boone, and while I was out, there was apparently a very serious accident. Traffic on 6E (that we can't monitor and stream) got patched over to R1 - TAC 15 (that we CAN monitor and stream). Since I wasn't home, I couldn't add TAC 15 to the Boone stream temporarily. So, I'm going to add a stream for the R1 TAC channels. I'll still, when I'm around, manually add a TAC channel to a county's stream when there's something going on. But this will help a little bit when something happens and I'm not here.

2) I'm also setting up a stream for the medevac helicopters. My wife was an EMT back east, and she enjoys listening to the patient reports and thinking back to her time as an EMT. So - the stream is active now and I'll add the selection this weekend.

3) Back to last night's call, that's why I made the recordings section. When we got home, we could listen to the recordings and try to figure out what was going on (and why there was a cop parked at W 3rd and Old Hwy 30 with his lights on, half-blocking the street but still letting cars go through).

4) I figured out the logistics / engineering behind setting up remote sites and feeding into the system. Now I just need to actually FIND places to install remote sites. But it's coming. This will enable us to carry counties that are outside of my range to hear right now.

5) Don't forget about our group discussion page https://www.facebook.com/groups/nciss/ - you can discuss the site and incidents over there, which you can't do here. Facebook won't let anyone but page owners post on a page like this one.

6) Same with our Substack. Folks who prefer to get their updates by email instead of Facebook will appreciate our Substack. You can find it here: https://nciss.substack.com/

Thank you all for your support - it means a lot to me. As always, if you like what you see and hear, please feel free to share the site with others!

My personal Substack. Click to read NCISS's Substack, a Substack publication. Launched 8 days ago.

06/23/2026

And, we are live! The new "Activity Dashboard" is up and running on NCISS. You can find this page by opening the "Signals" drop down in the top menu and selecting "Recent Activity." I hope you find this as interesting as I do. :-) Who are the biggest users of the systems NCISS monitors? And what can you hear vs. what is hidden? Inquiring minds want to know... and now you can easily see it!

Also - great article today about NCISS in the Calhoun Phoenix, authored by Alycia Dioneda Schneedle. You can find the article here: https://www.calhouncountyphoenix.com/dana-resident-launches-scanner-network-covering-calhoun-county-and-surrounding-areas

06/23/2026

I want to give you a preview of a new feature coming soon to NCISS. It should be ready to roll out in the next day... two tops. A detailed table of how many times any particular talkgroup has been activated, and whether or not it's encrypted. Listed in descending order by traffic.

06/17/2026

If any of you experienced a disruption in radio streams lately, I apologize for the inconvenience. NCISS enabled some more robust watchdog and reboot/reset processes, and they needed a little bit of fine tuning. Which has been accomplished now.

NCISS will reload every day at 0300 CT. Any streams that are active will be reset at that time. And, every Sunday at 0330 CT, the entire system will do a quick reboot to get everything back to clean. That will also reset any active streams.

This means that any stream you leave running overnight will need to be reset in the morning. It's a bit of an inconvenience, I get it - but it keeps the system from bogging down with closed resources that will otherwise slow everything down or even cause the system to crash.

There are also some watchdog processes that are now monitoring the system, and they'll force a reset or reboot if anything gets out of control before the daily reset. I don't foresee that happening, but they're in place now just in case.

Thank you for your patience as the system continues to grow. There's more in store - we're just getting started. If you like what you see, please, feel free to share with others!

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06/15/2026

2000 blk of 190th Street in Boone... Accident with serious injury, possibly fatal. Boone County calling for 2 choppers and placing a Fire All Call alert. I'll patch in the TAC channel if they make use of it (R1-TAC 12). Boone County traffic is on 5E - can't get that one, it's encrypted.

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06/10/2026

As promised, a little while ago. Here is an early production picture of a device that will let you listen to NCISS streams without needing a web browser. I still have some testing to do, but so far, it seems quite promising. Open to discussions over in our discussion group!

06/03/2026

Streams for Adair, Madison, and Wright Counties are now live in NCISS!

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