Different Scanners

[hunterdgm]

Hello, new to this, hope this is the right section.
l'm from Middlesex County, west of London Ontario Canada.
What is the difference between anolog, digital, and trunked units.
How do you tell what a Department is using, ie Police or Fire Service, ect.
Thanks in advance.

 

[captclint]

Hello, new to this, hope this is the right section.
l'm from Middlesex County, west of London Ontario Canada.
What is the difference between anolog, digital, and trunked units.

Price! :lol:

How do you tell what a Department is using, ie Police or Fire Service, ect.

Check here: Middlesex County At the bottom of the page, all trunked systems are listed. You need to click on each one and scroll down to the talk group section. A "D" in the mode column indicates that agency is digital, and and "E" means encrypted, so you can't monitor. BTW, Uniden scanners mute the white noise from encryption, which RS and GRE do not. If the system has mostly "A", then a non-digital (A)nalog trunking scanner will do.
For the most part, any listing above the Trunking section is not Trunked(unless specifically otherwise stated), is not digital, and can be monitored with most any scanner. However, there are a lot of notes that seem to indicate these agencies have moved to trunking systems, so ask on the ONT forum to clarify their status.

So you just need to decide how important the digital agencies are to you because you will spend approx $250 more for a digital unit.

 

[N8IAA]

GRE, PSR-800 mutes encrypted TGID's also. You may want to post in the Eastern Canada forum to see what you will need to monitor your area. There will be better info there.
Larry

 

[UPMan]

What is the difference between anolog, digital, and trunked units.

Analog scanners will not decode the digital P25 voice encoding used by some agencies.
Digital scanners will decode the digital P25 voice encoding used by some agencies.
Trunked scanners can follow conversations on trunked radio systems.

All digital scanners are also trunking scanners.
Analog scanners can be either trunking or conventional.