Port 3430: Scott Studios Dispatch — A Registered Port from Radio's Automation Era

What This Port Is

Port 3430 is a registered port, officially assigned by IANA to ssdispatch — the Scott Studios Dispatch protocol. It was registered in March 2002 for use with Scott Studios SS32, a radio broadcast automation platform that handled music scheduling, commercial playback, and live-assist operations at radio stations across the United States.¹

Both TCP and UDP are registered for this port, consistent with a system that needed both reliable delivery and low-latency signaling across a local broadcast facility network.

The Software Behind It

Scott Studios was founded by Dave Scott in 1992. By the early 2000s, SS32 was installed at roughly 4,600 radio stations — a significant share of American commercial radio.² The software controlled what played on air, when it played, and how multiple workstations in a station coordinated with each other. The "Dispatch" component handled inter-system communication: the message-passing layer that let machines inside a station talk to each other.

Port 3430 was that channel.

The story didn't end quietly. Scott Studios was acquired by dMarc Broadcasting, which was then acquired by Google in 2006. SS32 became "Google Radio Automation," briefly placing Google at the center of American commercial radio infrastructure before Google exited the business.³ Dave Scott eventually partnered with ENCO Systems to provide continued support for SS32 installations, and some legacy stations ran SS32 well into the 2010s.

Whether any production systems still use this port is unclear. The software has no active development path, and most stations have migrated to other automation platforms.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 3430 falls in the registered port range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services upon application, but IANA doesn't enforce usage — nothing prevents other software from using this port. Registered ports sit between the strictly controlled well-known ports (0–1023, which require root on Unix) and the free-for-all ephemeral range (49152–65535) used for short-lived connections.

In practice, a registered port with no active, widely-deployed service becomes just another available number. If you see traffic on port 3430 today, it's unlikely to be SS32.

How to Check What's Listening

If you're investigating a machine and port 3430 is active, these commands identify the process:

Linux / macOS:

# Show process using port 3430
lsof -i :3430

# Or with ss (Linux)
ss -tlnp | grep 3430

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3430

Then cross-reference the PID with Task Manager or tasklist to identify the process. If it's not SS32 — and in 2024 it almost certainly isn't — treat it as unknown traffic worth investigating.