new to Austin

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unit91

Newbie
Joined
Jan 15, 2010
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2
Location
austin, tx
I am a new and want to know what type of equipment I would need in order to listen to Austin/Travis/Willimson counties. Do I need a digital scanner to listen to APCO-25 or would any re-banded scanner work? I have read a bunch of post on your forum and I know I little bit. I look forward to hearing from anyone.
 

davidbond21

Member
Joined
May 18, 2005
Messages
531
Location
New Braunfels, TX
Unit 91, welcome to Radio Reference first off.

Yes, you will need a digital scanner to be able to listen to Austin/Travis County public safety, which you can have a look at here. You have a number of options available to you: the GRE PSR-500(handheld) and PSR-600(mobile), the RadioShack Pro-106(handheld) and Pro-197(mobile), of which I'm personally familiar with using on this system, and you also have Uniden's 396XT(handheld) and 996XT(mobile) scanners which while I haven't used myself, I think others from the area would attest that they also get the job done. I also know that the older RadioShack Pro-96 and Pro-2096 will work too, but I can't say the same for sure of the Uniden older digital scanners 396T and 996T. The only reason I mention the older scanners is that if you're on a budget, these might be acceptable alternatives that you can pick up online.
 

texasemt13

CenTex DBA
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Jun 6, 2007
Messages
2,372
Location
Hunter, TX
Austin is such a busy system you'd be best suited with an object oriented memory scanner. The intuitive interface is easy to manipulate with multiple agencies, on multiple trunking sites within a trunked radio system. As davidbond linked though, any old digital trunking scanner would work (though your best bet would defintely be a scanner that can handle re-banded frequencies- as all of the 86V.WXYZ MHz frequencies will be rebanded to 85V.WXYZ frequencies soon enough. A scanner that can handle 700MHz P25 trunking would be best (though only two sites in this system use 700MHz: Central Austin and Caldwell County- I'm sure more will eventually). If you end up with any of the GRE scanners (a PSR-500/600 or the rebranded GRE's: Radioshack Pro-106/197) let me know and I'd be happy to send you a win500 (free trial of this awesome programming software found here) file for Austin Travis County that uses mostly the Simulcast 1 Site and the Williamson County Site.
 
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