Road trip advice for listening to freqs along the way?

[tomas21]

How does everyone setup their scanners when making a road trip for the holidays?

Do you just search the freqs or some type of structure in putting all local agencies along your route in the scanner?

 

[clanusb]

i have a binder full of ham and public safety freqs for all the counties i travel through. i just look up the county, then the town/city and plug them right in.

 

[SCPD]

I have a GRE PSR-600 installed in our "out of town" car. There are 20 files of 1800 frequencies or talkgroups in each file. We have relatives in the Bay Area, southern California, Reno, and the Phoenix. I have written files for each area with enroute frequencies/talkgroups as well. I have other files for less frequented areas. I have scan lists set up with the highway patrol and DOT's near the top, then each county in the order I travel them. I make the highway patrol and DOT's separate scan lists (banks) because I want to make sure I hear everything on them and can turn off the local county banks when the highway radio traffic gets busy. This is because the highway traffic is most likely to affect our drive.

I live in Mammoth Lakes, CA and have an eastern Sierra file, followed by a California Desert, file, then a Los Angeles file for trips that way, and a southern Arizona file if we head to Phoenix. When I travel to the Bay Area I have one file for the western slope Sierra Nevada and central valley south counties, then a Bay Area file when I reach that point. I have the CHP and Caltrans in separate banks near the top.

I've written each file with geographical trigger points that are normally a county or state line, with some overlap in the highway lists so I can receive traffic from the next area ahead. An example is in my California Desert file in the highway list (bank) I've included the western most district of the Arizona DOT, as I can start receiving them starting at the summit between Indio and Blythe.

I hope this helps.

 

[SCPD]

I should add that most of the time I only listen to the highway patrol and DOT lists and not those of local jurisdictions unless I leave the highway. By doing this I've been able to save many hours by hearing of congestion or accidents ahead and take alternate routes.

I like listening to natural resources and land management agencies more than anything else so those agencies always in my top list.

When I owned scanners before we could program them by computer I used to handwrite files. I had to stop and enter up to 200 frequencies by hand when I reached my trigger points. Scanners did not have alphanumeric displays either, so in unfamiliar locations I had to check the list often to figure out what I'm hearing.

With pre-written files all I have to do is pull to the side of the road and load the next file. With the huge capacity of the new scanners we don't have to miss anything.

 

[ranger821]

I will have my RS 197 on Black Friday. Have just started using the computer to load files on my Pro 97. Done it by hand for many years. Ex smokey, I like how you have done the files for each county. I will be getting the Win500 software shortly.

john
KB4OIF

 

[gmclam]

Travel profiles

How does everyone setup their scanners when making a road trip for the holidays?

It depends on which scanner, where I am going and the type of trip.

Generally speaking I have several scanner profiles for each "destination area". The profiles include all LE & fire dispatch channels (and select tac channels) for the trip along the way. If using a scanner with enough memory, I program it all in there. But for something like a PSR-300 I have the following profiles I load:
Sacramento
Bay Area
Los Angeles
Santa Barbara
North State (CA)
Pacific Northwest
Nevada

If I am going to be in multiple destinations for an extended time; let's say the Bay area and then Santa Barbara, I'll load one profile when I leave home and reprogram my scanners from a laptop when leaving from location 1 to 2.

 

[Matthew49ers]

I have a Uniden SC230 and when I travel I just use the Custom Search and let scan until I pick up something and then I'll quick save it for later listening.

If I can I come here or do a google search and manually add them to my scanner, so it really depends.