Agreed. Especially since GRE produced the PRO 2005/6 for Rat Shack… one of the hottest scanning receivers in its time! (Whistler absorbed GRE but to what extent I’m not aware. As long as we are reminiscing, is there a history of how Radio Reference came to be? Just curious. I surmised long ago that with the advent of trunking (and the various modes that accompanied it) the manual programming process was going to be the death of scanners… if they didn’t remain user friendly the market was likely to dry up. Programming hundreds of individual settings manually for each trunked system was invariably going to cause typos, not to mention, even if correctly programed, these trunking capable scanners would take a month of Sundays to set up. I wonder if the idea of using a “crowd sourced” databank, much like RR, was proposed to the manufacturers by the databank people or was it an idea the manufacturers approached the databanks with? To access RR in the beginning it was free. A databank people subscribed to and supported by submitting data on the agencies they were listening to. Back in the day, I would use a portable frequency counter to capture frequencies for my scanner and then share with others. It’s the same with RR. And I had no problem with RR when they asked for donations and then subscriptions (which allowed for pulling down data from RR to place in my scanner’s programming software for the additional download into the scanner’s memory. It was a god send!) But the history behind RR eludes me. Did it turn out to be a profitable endeavor financially for the owner(s)? Did the manufacturers help in the expense of building out an extensive database, etc.? Did I miss a publication or book on “The History of Scanning”?
