New to scanning and RR

[mikewpu04]

Hello all,
My name is Mike and I live in central NJ. I am actually a TV engineer who had been assigned to programming a few scanners (BCT15Xs) as part of a project. Well now I am hooked. I learned how to program them from resources like RR, so thanks to all of you out there for the assist, even if you don't know you helped. I updated the firmware on the units, subscribed to an RR premium account, got a copy of FreeSCAN, downloaded all of the local frequencies, and off I went scanning away.

I purchased my first gear which was a BCD996XT and a Comet BNC W100RX all-band whip. So far, I have had good results for table-top scanning. The RR database download was an immense start. I now can program conventional systems from the front panel and modify them as well. Not yet able to do trunking or P25 setups yet, but I'll get there. I am listening to the trunked and digital systems in my area thanks to the RR download.

So I guess my question is, whats the threshold for number of scanners you listen to at the same time? I get pretty overloaded after 4 of them if they are all going at the same time or close to it, so I was curious what more experienced people had.

 

[lep]

I have 7 but I rarely listen to more than 3 at a time. Usually I listen to the same trunking system on the 3 in use, it is amazing how much traffic is 'missed' just listening to a single one,..especially onhe same incident where pd/fire/rescue are all 3 dispatched individually and do not communicate with each other by radio.

 

[W8RMH]

I love to listen to public safety and I dispatch for an alerting service.

It is not unusual for me to be listening to three scanners on my desk plus 2 "Scanner Live" software windows scanning 10 feeds each.

After a while you kinda get "an ear" for it by recognizing dispatcher voices, unit numbers, and dispatching styles, but then again I've been doing this for around 50 years.

 

[Rt169Radio]

Hi Mike, welcome to RR. You can see how many radios I have in my BIO. Now the max amount of scanners I have going at one time is three.

 

[mikewpu04]

Thanks for all of your great responses.

It looks like I will be starting with two... One analog only scanner and the 996XT. I will have to work on my listening skills for sure!!