Years back (1980's era) there was a Radio Shack in Evergreen Park IL (SW suburbs of Chicago) that got the Police Calls in stock each year weeks ahead of every other store for some reason. I had a friend who lived in the area who would let us know when they arrived and several of us from the far NW burbs would trek down there to get them. There was a RadioShack version of Police Call with a slightly different cover for many years but one could get them from other sources as well.
Every time I got out to the LA area I would stop at the scanner store in Anaheim and usually get a copy of the SoCal Detail Version, this was not usually available at Radio Shack and was not included in the Major Contributor distribution. (See below)
I also travelled to Canada quite a bit then and there was a book called Haruteq that had Ontario and Quebec versions. There may have been a Maratimes version as well. I don't think they did anything for western Canada, you were pretty much on your own out there.
Eventually I became a major contributor to Police Call, got my name listed in the book and a free set of 9 volumes for free each year. Between those and the ones I had purchased before I had boxes of them. Eventually Gene passed the PoliceCall torch to Rich Barnett of ScannerMaster. Some of the volumes were merged and I think at the end there were only 6 but they also included a CD with the data and a front end application.
I kept my collection of Police Calls for years until I moved out of state and after taking a couple select examples, I gave away the rest to other radio guys. I had 7 or 8 copier paper boxes full of them and gave them away at my last CARMA meeting before I moved, along with a metric ton of accumulated radio stuff from my basement that did not make the move to Arizona. I kept one or two older versions of Volume 4 along with the last one as well as an old SOCal Detail one.
Sometime later (Mid 90's) I was approached by Rich Barnett to create an Illinois version of the Scanner Master guide, myself and a couple other Chicago guys put together a phonebook-sized book. I also edited several states for the Monitor America books of the era.
Police Call was a great reference source, but like has been said, was pretty much a well-edited data dump. There were a lot of added notes ("F1") type stuff in the data. One year while home sick with chicken pox for a couple weeks I sat down in front of my Mac Plus and entered the complete Illinois section into a FileMaker database, line by line. This was of course before the Percon databases were available. I combined this with some local accumulations of info (The infamous PL List, the Wisconsin guys data among others) and we had a pretty good database going for the area.
When Percon came around it was a great resource. They produced a series of CD's with data from the FCC files for just about everything. There were two versions, a Nationwide scanner-oriented one that had specific fields and regional ones with the complete file of all fields. They also included a Windows front end but being Mac guys we would usually export the FoxPro formatted .dbf's into a text file so we could then import it into FileMaker which was a much simpler way to view, search and edit the data. Back in the day with computers running at 8 MHz. such an import would take days and result in files with over a million records. These days such an import might take long enough for me to get up and grab a soda from the kitchen.
Nowadays with RadioReference we have all that info and more available at our fingertips. While it was fun back then paging thru books of data it is a lot easier now to look stuff up online.
Every time I got out to the LA area I would stop at the scanner store in Anaheim and usually get a copy of the SoCal Detail Version, this was not usually available at Radio Shack and was not included in the Major Contributor distribution. (See below)
I also travelled to Canada quite a bit then and there was a book called Haruteq that had Ontario and Quebec versions. There may have been a Maratimes version as well. I don't think they did anything for western Canada, you were pretty much on your own out there.
Eventually I became a major contributor to Police Call, got my name listed in the book and a free set of 9 volumes for free each year. Between those and the ones I had purchased before I had boxes of them. Eventually Gene passed the PoliceCall torch to Rich Barnett of ScannerMaster. Some of the volumes were merged and I think at the end there were only 6 but they also included a CD with the data and a front end application.
I kept my collection of Police Calls for years until I moved out of state and after taking a couple select examples, I gave away the rest to other radio guys. I had 7 or 8 copier paper boxes full of them and gave them away at my last CARMA meeting before I moved, along with a metric ton of accumulated radio stuff from my basement that did not make the move to Arizona. I kept one or two older versions of Volume 4 along with the last one as well as an old SOCal Detail one.
Sometime later (Mid 90's) I was approached by Rich Barnett to create an Illinois version of the Scanner Master guide, myself and a couple other Chicago guys put together a phonebook-sized book. I also edited several states for the Monitor America books of the era.
Police Call was a great reference source, but like has been said, was pretty much a well-edited data dump. There were a lot of added notes ("F1") type stuff in the data. One year while home sick with chicken pox for a couple weeks I sat down in front of my Mac Plus and entered the complete Illinois section into a FileMaker database, line by line. This was of course before the Percon databases were available. I combined this with some local accumulations of info (The infamous PL List, the Wisconsin guys data among others) and we had a pretty good database going for the area.
When Percon came around it was a great resource. They produced a series of CD's with data from the FCC files for just about everything. There were two versions, a Nationwide scanner-oriented one that had specific fields and regional ones with the complete file of all fields. They also included a Windows front end but being Mac guys we would usually export the FoxPro formatted .dbf's into a text file so we could then import it into FileMaker which was a much simpler way to view, search and edit the data. Back in the day with computers running at 8 MHz. such an import would take days and result in files with over a million records. These days such an import might take long enough for me to get up and grab a soda from the kitchen.
Nowadays with RadioReference we have all that info and more available at our fingertips. While it was fun back then paging thru books of data it is a lot easier now to look stuff up online.
