I’ve been listening to a first responder receiver since I was a young boy back in the 50’s-60’s. My town’s vol FD used sirens to alert the members. When that siren sounded, everybody wondered where the FD was headed, especially during the spring and fall when brush fires were abundant (outside burning was allowed, people burnt their garbage, yard cleanup debris, etc.). My first radio was a Realistic Patrolman tunable VHF Low band 30-50 MHz. Both my town’s FD & PD were on this band, but I had to tune between them manually. When Regency came out with a crystal controlled 4 channel scanning radio I was in 7th heaven!
The entire county was using a single frequency for Fire Dispatch, no PL’s, with little or no FG secondary channels. But because of the “party line” usage, the county frequency became crowded to the point where individual FD’s moved off of the county frequency to their own VHF Low band frequency, or up to the UHF Band, where they not only enjoyed a quieter dispatch frequency, they pretty much eliminated the interference caused by band openings (skip) that was prevalent at the time on VHF Low band. And then Regency came out with a VHF/UHF scanner… basically two radios in one, with 2 crystal controlled, 4 channel boards. It worked out nicely but the “missed transmission” problems were beginning to become apparent. It wasn’t a problem for me because I kept my 4 channel VHF Low band scanner and the Patrolman tunable receiver, running all 3!
A neighboring mutual aid town went to UHF which caused a problem when conducting mutual aid calls but I suggested as a temporary stop gap method we install single channel monitors aboard the apparatus on our vehicles set to the frequencies of our mutual aid friends, and the neighboring towns do the same. We could listen to them on their frequency and they could do the same on our frequency, cross channel talk. That worked for a while but it wasn’t long until the radio shops started offering dual band radios, or carrying a portable radio tuned to our mutual aid friends frequencies.
Today, the county doesn’t use the old county VHF Low band frequency (with a few exceptions). All county FD’s have their own assigned frequencies with mutual aid concerns being handled using prescribed channels and/or “patches” with common PL’s, on their conventional VHF/UHF repeater-ized systems. But it didn’t stop there… now there is a P25 statewide trunked system that is available to all PD & FD (among other agencies). Yet another option on an entirely different band. This means that between all the conventional VHF/UHF systems and the statewide trunked system the need for additional receivers is a necessity if you don’t want to miss anything. Getting a second and third receiver, and dedicating them to the agencies you are most interested in is a must… just like I learned when early on, I kept my first tunable rig and VHF low band 4 channel scanner, playing along with the new dual band VHF/UHF Regency scanner! I kept up with the times and today I enjoy monitoring with the purchase of a couple of SDS200’s and a SDS100… and I still miss a lot!
(The trip through the years, with all the scanner offerings was fun though. I still revel over the introduction of the PRO 2006… a drastic improvement in reception quality over previous scanners made it my most memorable, and enjoyable upgrade ever!)
The old saying “The more you scan, the less you hear!” is now more apparent than ever!
