As mentioned below, I’d hope to enable her to hear the majority of basic emergency traffic. The budget is about $300 +/-.
Thanks! Mike
As
jt has already noted,what with law enforcement, for all the agencies in the county, being encrypted, and everything that is
not encrypted is P25 Phase II on simulcast sites, a $300 budget is not going to stretch far enough to be useful. A P25 Phase II capable scanner is going to be over your budget target, even if your friend is extremely lucky enough to be at a location where simulcast is not a problem. Other than a lucky find on a previously owned scanner, a Phase II capable scanner is out of reach, even if their location mitigates simulcast issues/
You might want to look at the feeds available for that area on Broadcastify feeds and the calls nodes. You might find that most of what is wanted can be monitored in that manner. The disadvantage for feeds, though, is that you are limited to whatever a feed provider has included on the channel. Also, unlike having your own scanner, you cannot choose to hold on a specific channel for an active incident. Depending on how the provider has configured the agencies on the feed, what really interests your friend is likely to be interspersed with radio traffic not of interest. The cost advantage of pursuing the options for feeds and calls is that these can be monitored on an inexpensive tablet, or cell phone. The cell phone could be an older model, no longer used as a phone, but still capable of internet access with a browser to access one or more feeds. There are a number of tablets, including Amazon's Fire Tablet line, that can be found that are $100 or less.
