Out of Luck
Hello , my name is big "e" , i want to buy a scanner to listen to fire/police . I currently listen on a app on my cellphone. Im looking to spend between 100 to 300 dollars on a portable scanner. I know nothing about scanners . Like what trunking is or anything. I live in sarasota fl. I would like to listen to all of the police freqs and fire freqs. Any ideas ? Thank you
From what I am seeing in the Radio Reference data base, you will need a digital scanner to listen to Sarasota county. You can forget listening to the Florida highway patrol since it is largely encrypted.
You might find a Radio Shack Pro-106 at a pawn shop; however, you would still need to buy the USB programming cable, power source & programming software such as Win500 unless you are going to manually program the radio. In my opinion, manual programming is tedious, annoying & harder to do.
I suppose you could charge your batteries outside of the scanner, the preferred method. You can buy nickel hydride batteries such as Sanyo Eneloop (four).
Some people in pawn shops may be misinformed regarding their merchandise. I know of a pawn shop in my city that sells digital radios for a very small price. The aforementioned radio is sometimes on sale for $299.00 something.
