I think Eric is still the manager of the HRO in Burbank. Eric used to be an editor of the Radio Communications Monitoring Association (RCMA) monthly magazine, which was the best source of information for the scanner hobbyist up until the mid 90's. Eric contributed a lot to the RCMA over the years.
From the 1970s until the 90s, the RCMA was really the pre-internet version of RadioReference. Instead of up-to-the-second database updates and forum postings, we had the monthly
RCMA Journal, and those of us in Southern California had monthly meetings in Anaheim and later Los Alamitos where we could swap frequencies and stories.
In some respects though, the hobby is much easier and less expensive now. The one that comes to mind is that we used to have to buy crystals that cost about 5% of the cost of the scanner itself, one for each frequency.
Most scanners only had a 8-10 channel capacity and if you wanted to change frequencies you had to pull the cover off the radio and physically change the crystals, something that required needle nose pliers and an even steady pull. Traveling out of your local area to different states and listening elsewhere could be very expensive and time consuming. Today's scanners, with huge memory capacities and ability to write huge files for each area you travel to is so much easier than it was.
Taking that a little further, after LAPD left the AM broadcast band for VHF high, in 1967 I bought a Radio Shack "Patrolman" monitor, a little tunable AM & VHF transistor radio, which had poor sensitivity and even worse selectivity. Hearing the cars was pretty much out of the question (repeaters weren't common), and the entire band from 147-174 MHz was squeezed within about 3/4 of a turn of the nickel-sized tuning knob. You could hear LAPD's 158.91, 159.03 and 159.15 dispatch frequencies without turning the knob. Unless two were transmitting at once, and then you usually got gobbledygook. And the price? $24.95 plus 4.95 more for an AC adapter. In 2008 dollars that would be about $190.77 (
The Inflation Calculator)
In 1976 I got the first programmable scanner, a whopping 16-channel Bearcat 101. You programmed it with toggle-switches, and you had to look up (
or calculate) the binary code for each frequency to enter it. AC power only. Want to use it mobile? Add $39.95 for the MK101 DC/AC inverter, for a total of $389.90. In today's money:
$1,459.00. No freq display, no banks, no PL tones, no search, no priority, just 16 hard-to-reprogram frequencies and a row of flashing red lights.
The following year we were finally blessed with the first - gasp - keyboard-programmable scanner, the 10-channel Bearcat 210. $299.99 unless you could find a trustworthy mail-order outfit to save a few bucks. In 2008 dollars that was
$1,122.56.
So five bills for the current crop of do-everything scanners isn't such a bad deal at all. $500 today equals $142 in 1977 (half the cost of the BC210), or in 1967 just a little over twice the cost of the pathetic little Patrolman tunable package, around $78.
