Back then your options were basically Ettus transceivers for >$1K or the little RTL dongles for $20 that didn't have sufficent bandwidth to do much good. Since then a whole crop of SDRs have hit the market in the <$500 range that could do this kind of thing.
For a little side project she did a fantastic job (very good write-ups of the trials and tribulations in her blog as well).
I will admit that I actually listened to the original system a lot with headphones, so I had every reason to fine-tune it until it sounded as awesome as possible. If you go back far enough into 2011, you can find a bunch of calls with terrible audio before I figured out the finer points of squelch, tuning errors, and 48 vs. 44.1 kHz :-)
I haven't decided whether it's worth building another system now that I have time to actually listen again. Hmm...
(I love all your posts!)
BTW, isn't posting captures of radio transmission online illegeal, because it qualiifes as "rebroadcasting" under the FCC regulations?
(a) The term rebroadcast means reception by radio of the programs or other transmissions of a broadcast or any other type of radio station, and the simultaneous or subsequent retransmission of such programs or transmissions by a broadcast station.
Internet websites are not broadcast stations.
Anything in ISM band or anything said on unencypted 'walkie talkie' bands e.g. Family Radio Service?