My county going digital

[lcmontana]

Although it kinda sucks that Lewis & Clark/City of Helena is switching to digital, I will most certainly spend the money on a new scanner.

My question is, is it likely that they will encode any or all of their communications so that even a $500 scanner is worthless? Kind of a lot of money to spend when it wont do any good.

If they wanted to increase privacy, then maybe they shouldnt be giving out their personal and PD cell phone numbers to eachother on the radio

/Joshua

 

[Voyager]

Although it kinda sucks that Lewis & Clark/City of Helena is switching to digital, I will most certainly spend the money on a new scanner.

My question is, is it likely that they will encode any or all of their communications so that even a $500 scanner is worthless? Kind of a lot of money to spend when it wont do any good.

If they wanted to increase privacy, then maybe they shouldnt be giving out their personal and PD cell phone numbers to eachother on the radio

/Joshua

You will probably just have to wait and see. BTW, it's encryption that makes the digital scanners useless, not encoding.

Just remember this: If they do, they will have a lot of people on the inside who won't be able to monitor them on scanners, either. Believe it or not, that is a factor in our favor.

Joe M.

 

[scanhoog]

I think the scanner manufacturers (Uniden, GRE, others...) should give 100 digital scanners to officials in any area that deploys digital.

This way, there'll be some resistance to encryption from the inside. The vendors, OTOH, probably just suggest an extra group of portables without xmit permissions. That way they sell even more hardware.

Overall, I agree with the comment above -- the internal need to use scanners does help prevent a larger mad rush to encryption.

However, over time, slowly but surely, encryption will prevail. If I get a few good years out of my recent digital scanner, I'll be happy. My town in CT switched to digital two weeks after I purchased an analog scanner. I quickly traded up and was surprised at how many digital systems I do pick up (a negative when I earlier considered a digital scanner was that I might not have any signals available to exploit it).

Happy Scanning