Late Night, Silent Scanner

[reconrider8]

Wheres this chat room located lol sounds kinda cool to have other people listening with each other

 

[SCPD]

IRC Channel #wunclub on Starchat servers...

You can use a 3rd party client or just go to StarChat IRC Network - Internet Relay Chat...

In the upper left, for "NICK" put in a handle or your name. Put in wunclub for the "CHAT" box and press the CHAT button.

The downside is the web site uses Java. So if you don't have that installed go to java.com: Java + You to download the latest version. The 3rd party programs don't require Java.

Search for "IRC client" and you'll find a ton of 3rd party programs. Just be sure that you're pointing to the Starchat server system. It doesn't matter which specific server as long as it's on the Starchat network.

FYI -- the room isn't super active all the time so be patient. Usually the room is active during the day and at night from 7pm - 3am Eastern time. A good name is to use whatever you have on RR. This really helps so we kind of know who you are...

 

[pinballwiz86]

Wait -- you just said you're not getting any scanner action... so now zero [scanner] action is better than HF???

BTW, I wasn't referring to listening to shortwave broadcasts. Talk about boring -- well unless you WANT to be put to sleep.

I was referring to SWL utilities. Searching for "action" is the whole point. You never know until you try.

I came across a numbers station a week ago and made a thread about it on here. Very cool stuff. I do like utilities more than shortwave broadcasts but I don't know where to find them. Can you point me in the right direction like a website or book?

Thank you.

 

[scannersnstuff]

although i know how you feel, i'm somewhat of a "scanner snob". i don't listen to police as a general rule,
the pd in my town is almost always active. i do make an exception, and listen to them. when it turns into motor vehicle stop after motor vehicle stop, i lock them out. i'm about 50 miles southeast of nyc. i'm very fortunate. i mainly like to listen to fire,some ems,aircraft,cg, and medevac helicopters. i split my scanning up in my main shack into.

scanner 1 - all local stuff/local fd's.

scanner 2 - njsp trunk. mainly only medevac and aviation. i'll be adding a few other tg's.

scanner 3 - spectrumsweeping. select other conventional frequencies.

i'm usually alway's within arms reach of a radio. sometimes i'll wake up several times during the night, and check whats going on with my bedside portable.

i really enjoy scanning !.

 

[902]

I came across a numbers station a week ago and made a thread about it on here. Very cool stuff. I do like utilities more than shortwave broadcasts but I don't know where to find them. Can you point me in the right direction like a website or book?

Thank you.

How about this: USCG MF & HF Channel Information ? I'm sure there's way more here. Search the Wiki and the HF forums.

 

[scannersnstuff]

anyone in listening range of 470.8375 pl. 136.5 would never not have anything to listen to. K.

 

[902]

anyone in listening range of 470.8375 pl. 136.5 would never not have anything to listen to. K.

Once upon a time it was 192.8. Wish I was still in listening range. You get spoiled growing up in the NYC metro. There's no place else like it anywhere.

 

[tunnelmot]

I used to listen to multiple radios at once, all the time(old job, long story) I must have heard 100s of traffic stops and false burglar alarm calls in an hour! So, to me , mdt's and slow times make it easier to scan. With all the hum drum routine traffic gone, when something really pops off, it tends to grab your attention. I've heard deputies in a rural county north of me run radio checks routinely cause their radio will go hours without any traffic. But when you hear activity, you know somethings up.

 

[scannersnstuff]

Once upon a time it was 192.8. Wish I was still in listening range. You get spoiled growing up in the NYC metro. There's no place else like it anywhere.

i always said this is the sweetest spot <to me anyway> for listening. i still can't get ocean counties uhf fire paging channel on any base scanner. i have to use my yaesu vx-6r for that. stellar radio !.

my wife wants to pack up and move to palm beach county fla. they can have their hodge podge of digital/encrypted/trunked crap. although, monmouth county will not be far off with their system.

 

[902]

i always said this is the sweetest spot <to me anyway> for listening. i still can't get ocean counties uhf fire paging channel on any base scanner. i have to use my yaesu vx-6r for that. stellar radio !.

my wife wants to pack up and move to palm beach county fla. they can have their hodge podge of digital/encrypted/trunked crap. although, monmouth county will not be far off with their system.

I used to pick up KMK200 in Bergen County, no problem. I also had all of the 33 MHz fire frequencies programmed into a Syntor-X so that I had Ocean County, Middlesex County, and Chester County coming through, or hear what was going on when we were on a road trip. You could start at Ohio and drive eastward to NJ and hear one of the local fire departments on either 33 or 46 MHz as you drove down the road. We had it good. I think Ocean is migrating to 700. Between the TV interference from Boston and the Congressional kickback requirement of T-Band, their system has some short and long term issues, even though I thought it worked great when there was no interference. You probably can't get it because simulcast is designed to work within a contained area. Not sure what they are using for antenna patterns, but the signals may be directed back into the county. Not sure where you are in "Mommet" but that might be it.

Florida?! Meh. It's hot and humid 10 months out of the year (maybe more way down there). Running the air conditioning costs $300/mo. or more. It's like year-round summer, except the days still get short. Besides, everything's trunked down there. You want that?

Pinballwiz86, make sure you tune across low band! MSHP might still have some activity on it. SEMA still has base stations in Jeff City, and there's lots of life left. You might hear auroral propagation after a solar flare! It sounds like very raspy, distorted audio and it's most pronounced on low band. I've only heard it at night.

 

[LIScanner101]

We still have fire dispatch on low band for nearly all Long Island FDs (46.10 Nassau, 46.46 Suffolk).

 

[pinballwiz86]

How about this: USCG MF & HF Channel Information ? I'm sure there's way more here. Search the Wiki and the HF forums.

Thanks! I will check that out and try to find them and also search the wiki some more.

Pinballwiz86, make sure you tune across low band! MSHP might still have some activity on it. SEMA still has base stations in Jeff City, and there's lots of life left. You might hear auroral propagation after a solar flare! It sounds like very raspy, distorted audio and it's most pronounced on low band. I've only heard it at night.

MSHP has switched over to "MOSWIN" aka, digital. Sometimes, I hear them say something on low band. Some type of alert but I can never understand what that means.

I'll try to listen to SEMA. I know Lebanon has OEM and I did hear them mobilize a while back during flooding. It was cool to hear.

Haven't heard auroral propagation yet. Will have to scan low band more often at night.


I picked up my first issue of Popular Communications (October) at a local grocery store. I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the magazine rack! There were just two copies left. So there must be some other hobbyists in the area keeping that magazine a secret. Haha.

 

[scannersnstuff]

902 thanks. i thought that oc would still use their 500 mhz. conventional fire dispatch because of the inability to page on a trunked system. my wife went to palm beach. got there monday. in the place she's staying, there was a a/c problem. it was 90 degs inside !.

liscanner. for some reason i can't seem to get 46.10 for nassau anymore. but yet, i ride by the oceanfront in monmouth county, and can pickup either suffolk or nassaus data control channel on closecall ?. go figure.

 

[902]

MSHP has EAS ENDECs that were tied to their low band base stations to broadcast alerts to various places. There are receivers at a number of "entry points," so you should hear the brrraps that sound like NOAA SAME encoding from time to time, usually followed by a voice announcement. Being on trunked has to be very different for the troopers. The senior troopers are used to only hearing another car on scan or talk-around. Now that they could all talk to each other, it has to be an entirely new point of view.

Volunteer and station alerting is a niche market and the big radio companies who invest a lot into R&D don't make a whole lot from it, especially with dwindling numbers of volunteers in metropolitan areas. I see a lot of volunteer ambulance squads in my home area (East Bergen) closing their doors and yielding to hospital-based EMS. I've even read about problems with volunteer fire departments. Those would have been sacrilegious 25 years ago. But alerting people who are in a station or vehicle or carrying around a portable can be done by a number of embedded features in the radio. You won't hear those signals on a scanner (really, there's nothing to hear), but they make the individual radio beep. They don't need to do two-tone. I have heard analog trunked systems using two-tone paging on their alerting talkgroups. They take a control station at a firehouse, then hook up an after-market tone decoder to it. The guys on the local FD (all career) tell me it works reliably, but if they transition to digital, they would probably figure out some other way of alerting. I wonder if we'll hear alerting on 33.78 again? Just when I had Ocean County's 33 MHz channel plan figured out and programmed into my Pro-2096, it was finished. That had to be less than 10 years ago. They've done a super job on the trunked system as it is today. I was living west of Philadelphia in 1998 and would go "down the shore" each weekend and would listen to their system before it had countywide coverage.

Yeah, Florida is good for 90 degrees inside buildings. A family member has a house there and the heat radiates down from the attic into the house. He had to replace the vent fan and that helped a little, but it's still not enough. His air conditioner is on constantly from maybe July to October and you could see the electric bill go from "normal people's electric use" to "Florida resident's electric use." At that, the AC seems to only keep the humidity down from 99% outside down to 60% inside with maybe two or three degrees difference. Maybe he needs a new air conditioner, but he can't afford it because he's paying his electric bill (and changing all the rusted hardware on his antennas). Or, maybe he needs to go back to where the seasons change

 

[scannersnstuff]

902, i hear ya'. when you think about it, there are only a very few companies making paging receivers now. i guess the BIG M otorola has the lions share. they heve not even come out with anything new since the minitor v. my minitor II still has the reception and interference rejection beat over the minitor v.

about the Fla. heat. the electric company rapes me in the summer, and the gas co. rapes me in the winter.LOL.

 

[pinballwiz86]

Seems like civil air has been more busy late night, lately.

 

[scannersnstuff]

civil air is always busy around here. i have newark,jfk and laguardia all within listening range. plus at least a few smaller airports. my county, and surrounding counties have plenty of medevac jobs to listen to. plus the monoc <paramedic/mede-evac helicopter service dispatch center is located a stones throw away.