BinaryMode
Blondie Once Said To Call Her But Never Answerd
While watching air traffic and listening on the scanner in the car from my "secretive location" (well, not so secretive), I kept getting annoying hits on FRS that was impeding my ability to monitor the air band system programed into my scanner. While I'm interested in scanning itinerant channels where I'm at, some of the traffic that day over FRS was annoying. And so being I can just press the "lock out" button once on my BCD396P2 and it'll temp lock out the channel until I power cycle the scanner. Which got me to thinking: that's actually a very cool feature when you think of it. Because back in the day if you hit lock out it was locked out for good unless you painstakingly went in bank per bank and unlocked the channels. Some scanners back then had a "review" feature for locked out channels. What is also nice (and some people may not know this) is that if you hit the "lock out" button twice in certain Uniden scanners in quick succession it'll perma lock out the channel or talkgroup rather than temporally.
The next best feature of today's scanners is of course "Close Call or the former "Signal Stalker." Back in the day my "close call" ability was a Radio Shack frequency counter of which I still own connected to a Radio Shack discone antenna. I used that with great success trying to see what frequency the train used as it passed the house when I was in high school exploring the world of scanners for the first time. It never did occur to me to just program all the railroad frequencies in my Radio Shack Pro-2042. And I had several copies of Police Call! LOL Today, with both of my scanners humming away 24/7 with "close call" active in one scanner, I was able to pick up a neighbor's plumber that was using a UHF business channel. Also, with the "close call" feature in the car scanner there have been times where I'd pass a railroad crossing or near tracks and pick up the train engine that was sitting there nearby. Since I scan the "close call" hits in a dedicated system I was able to hear the conversation long after I passed that railroad crossing.
It's pretty crazy that today certain scanners have a "close call" ability because that feature was more available with some Optoelectronics gear that I think they called "reaction Tuning." Oh, how I drooled over some of the Optoelectronics gear in the catalog. When I saw the OS535 board and saw that it was made for my Pro-2042 I knew I had to acquire it. One day I eventually did. Even found the code on the far reaches of the Internet to unlock all the locked out frequencies.
The third best feature would definitely be the ability to plug in the scanner to a computer. This was simply unheard of for most scanners back then. The aforementioned Pro-2042 and OS535 board allowed it, but at a significant cost. Today, it's pretty much the norm to buy a scanner with computer connectivity right out of the box. It certainly makes programing a scanner a lot easier. Especially when I can use copy/paste in Proscan. Because of that I can take data, massage it in Notepad++ and do a simple copy/paste into Proscan and *bam* just programmed 300 frequencies or talkgroups just like that.
So, those are my three. How about you?
The next best feature of today's scanners is of course "Close Call or the former "Signal Stalker." Back in the day my "close call" ability was a Radio Shack frequency counter of which I still own connected to a Radio Shack discone antenna. I used that with great success trying to see what frequency the train used as it passed the house when I was in high school exploring the world of scanners for the first time. It never did occur to me to just program all the railroad frequencies in my Radio Shack Pro-2042. And I had several copies of Police Call! LOL Today, with both of my scanners humming away 24/7 with "close call" active in one scanner, I was able to pick up a neighbor's plumber that was using a UHF business channel. Also, with the "close call" feature in the car scanner there have been times where I'd pass a railroad crossing or near tracks and pick up the train engine that was sitting there nearby. Since I scan the "close call" hits in a dedicated system I was able to hear the conversation long after I passed that railroad crossing.
It's pretty crazy that today certain scanners have a "close call" ability because that feature was more available with some Optoelectronics gear that I think they called "reaction Tuning." Oh, how I drooled over some of the Optoelectronics gear in the catalog. When I saw the OS535 board and saw that it was made for my Pro-2042 I knew I had to acquire it. One day I eventually did. Even found the code on the far reaches of the Internet to unlock all the locked out frequencies.
The third best feature would definitely be the ability to plug in the scanner to a computer. This was simply unheard of for most scanners back then. The aforementioned Pro-2042 and OS535 board allowed it, but at a significant cost. Today, it's pretty much the norm to buy a scanner with computer connectivity right out of the box. It certainly makes programing a scanner a lot easier. Especially when I can use copy/paste in Proscan. Because of that I can take data, massage it in Notepad++ and do a simple copy/paste into Proscan and *bam* just programmed 300 frequencies or talkgroups just like that.
So, those are my three. How about you?
