RadioReference User “pb_lonny” recently wrote in a post at https://forums.radioreference.com/t...4-hours-a-day-monitoring.499883/#post-4287337 a detailed story about how things have changed in his scanning activity Down Under. Well, these things are pretty much the same here on the top half of the globe.
When I first stated scanning about 55 years ago or so with a single radio I had a singular purpose: Listen to my Dad when he was out chasing bad guys on the local police department. Of course, in our small town the “bad guy” was more likely Mrs. Smith’s collie or Billy, the town drunk, who was also the mayor. It was pretty cool to hear Dad’s voice coming out of the radio, at least he wasn’t yelling at me to mow the lawn.
Back then it was a targeted listening protocol; one channel, one agency and one person that I wanted to hear. Pretty soon it evolved into listening less just for Dad but for what else was going on in town. Tom’s dad got a speeding ticket. Someone drove over Mrs. Jones’ front lawn again. The high school got egged. Pick up Billy at the bar so he isn’t late for the Village Board meeting.
Soon enough I started listening in on the other channels in that 8-channel scanner Dad bought from his friend. It also had the Sheriff’s department, the new fire channel (the FD had used the police channel until then) and a channel used by several police departments in the area. Oh, yeah, there were a bunch of towns that shared out town’s police channel also.
Then one day Dad put a scanner antenna on the roof, ran the wire to my room and plugged it into my 8-channel Regency scanner. Wow! I could hear all kinds of stuff from all over the Midwest on those same 8 channels. It wasn’t just our suburban area, it was Wisconsin, Indiana and, on summer nights, Iowa and Michigan. Again: Wow! It got even crazier when I got a scanner with low-band, now I could hear the State Police and sometimes skip from all over the country. California Highway Patrol, North Carolina and places I never figured out were coming in.
Eventually I became a radio professional, first as a firefighter/medic, then as a dispatcher and eventually a police officer. It was as a dispatcher that I started actively searching for activity rather than listening for content. Programmable scanners came around and changed everything. For years I had 2 types of scanning: content based and usage based. I would listen to my local stuff, targeting specific agencies. This was to keep up on what was going on around the area or things like railfanning or flying. I knew who and what I wanted to hear and bought crystals or programed frequencies specifically for them. Then I started using the Search function and started the second wave: Looking for what else was out there.
This brings me to “JimD56”’s post at https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/why-so-many-scanners-radios-pagers.500265/#post-4290431. Our good ol’ Lt. Jim discusses his usage for multiple radios. This radio for that, that radio for this. I hear ya, Brother!
At times over the decades, I have had as many as 30-35 radios in my shack and probably a dozen handhelds along with a half dozen in the car at any given time. Much like Jim, each radio usually had a specific purpose. Sometimes that purpose was that I really wanted that radio because it was just so cool (The AOR AR-DV1 comes to mind) but really had no practical purpose. Those radios usually did not last long; they were sold or traded for something more practical.
Things escalated when I moved across the country after retiring from my career job. I moved to Arizona and live within miles of the busiest fighter training base in the country. I am surrounded by MOA’s and actually live within one. There are several high-density jet training areas in the area. One of the papers I had to sign off on when I bought my house was to acknowledge that I live in an area subject to high-density jet training. I asked the mortgage closer if I had to pay extra for that. Boy did that confuse the heck out of her!
Now I had a dozen or so BCT15’s and 15X’s at the time, I had used them for Fire Tone Out searching and monitoring back in Chicagoland before I moved. I repurposed them for Military Air searching. I set them up for small segments of the Mil-Air band from 225-380 MHz. and would lock out any birdies and any active freqs once I identified them. By using logging software, I was able to see activity I may have missed when I was not actively listening and go back on monitor those freqs later.
I then did similar stuff for the local public safety stuff. The Phoenix area was pretty well sorted by radio hobbyists by the time I arrived here, but I was still able to find a bunch of new talkgroups and frequencies. I was a database editor, so I made dozens of updates. I then made contact with a guy named Joe, who lived on the other side of the Valley. He and I shared info and made a concerted effort to update the database even more.
When the new county P25 system was being built Joe and I took several day trips around the county to map out the various sites, finding the towers, and running logging software to determine the frequencies used. This county is huge, roughly the size of Vermont or New Hampshire so it took a lot of driving over several weekends to really map out the system. He and I built the system up in the database and over the next year or so we logged dozens of talkgroups and users. Joe passed away shortly thereafter after an accident, a tremendous loss to the hobby and to all that knew him.
Since then, I have rationalized my collection. Since I had developed a good handle on the local aviation, railroad and public safety stuff I cut down to “only” 10 scanners (4 536’s, 2 SDS200’s, 2 996’s and 2 260’s) in my shack, along with a couple ham and GMRS radios, as well as a pair of 536’s and a dual-bander in the car. I have a pretty decent collection of handhelds as well, but they don’t get used nearly as much these days.
These days I use the scanners mostly for logging. The SDS200’s are set up on the 2 main local P25 systems, one for the county and the other used by local communities. They are in “ID Search” mode and I check thru the logs periodically to see what new TGID’s show up, then try to figure out who/what they are.
The 536’s are used mostly for searching various bands. Sometimes I search low-band, sometimes VHF high-band. Skip on low band is still fun to listen to but there is a serious lack of activity there nowadays, especially compared to a couple decades ago. VHF high band is still pretty active, especially to my north, and the counties to the north of me are much less documented than things here in the Valley are. I am trying to figure out the myriad of fire channels in Yavapai County, what a convoluted mess that is!
The 996’s and 260’s are used for specific services that I am currently interested in: Railroad, Marine, Aviation and GRMS/FRS/MURS. Living out in the desert one would not expect to hear a lot on the marine channels but I have found that truckers love them out here. I also have my beloved R8600, that is usually parked on the local railroad channel when I am not twiddling the knob on it.
These days, when I am actively monitoring, I usually turn up the volume on one or two radios to listen for the activity I am then interested in. If I am doing something else in the office unrelated to scanning, I often just have one radio squawking. One trick I have used for years is to have Sentinel running on the computer when listening, I can then easily enter frequencies into a special Favorites List for future targeting and identification.
One question I have been asked many times is why I don’t use SDR’s instead of scanners, SDR’s seem to be a perfect tool for my kind of listening. They are probably right; I could probably do more with a half dozen SDR’s than a dozen radios and reduce the space occupied dramatically. While I have several SDR’s and have diddled around with them now and again, I just prefer “real” radios right now. Perhaps one of these days I will try to convert over to SDR’s like my buddy Rich M. has. In fact, I have a half dozen of his SDR’s set up at my house for his system. I have access to his wide-area system but rarely avail myself of the privilege. This brings me to my next thought on my monitoring habits detailed in the next paragraph.
Public Safety monitoring just doesn’t interest me much anymore. I spent a career of 40+ years on both sides of the aisle in public safety. I was a firefighter/medic, police officer, dispatcher and finally the director of our 9-1-1 system. I have been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it. Listening to police and fire just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
Railroad radio is pretty much the thing I ALWAYS listen to these days, and where I live, I have one radio permanently parked on the local BNSF Road channel and another scanner just scanning the rest of the rail channels. Over the last few days there has been a large and fast-moving wildfire about 15 miles from me, complete with aerial water-bombers and all the rest. I have pretty much ignored that, other than some CloseCall hits on some of their aviation channels. Since this fire is affecting my local railroad line however, they have been chattering non-stop and it has been fascinating. The line was closed for much of the day yesterday, and they still coordinate trains with the fire commanders. Crews have run out of duty time and had to coordinate taxi rides. Locomotives have had issues due to the excessive heat. Coordinating meets with the shortline to the west had to be renegotiated as the interchange is adjacent to the fire zone. It has been a great couple of days for listening here!
So, what’s next for me? Well, as I said before the obvious thing would be SDR’s. My dream SDR setup would be a small formfactor PC, such as a NUC or Minisforum, a decent USB hub, a half-dozen or so SDR’s and building a multicoupler like the one I built for the scanners, all on a rack shelf. (See https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/scanner-tales-rolling-my-own-multicoupler-that-is.491473/). In fact, that is exactly what I have now for my buddy’s system. If I really get into it, I could see this replacing the huge radio cabinet I am now using. I still like the old school scanner set up but I might give it a whirl in the next year or so. I could put all this in a small rack cabinet, or even in one shared by my buddy’s system and my network gear. It would take up a lot less room than my current system for sure!
This hobby is constantly changing. We went from crystals to computers, paper lists and books to online databases, I can even listen to scanner traffic from all over the country online. Who would have thought about the stuff we have now back in the 1960’s when I got my start?
When I first stated scanning about 55 years ago or so with a single radio I had a singular purpose: Listen to my Dad when he was out chasing bad guys on the local police department. Of course, in our small town the “bad guy” was more likely Mrs. Smith’s collie or Billy, the town drunk, who was also the mayor. It was pretty cool to hear Dad’s voice coming out of the radio, at least he wasn’t yelling at me to mow the lawn.
Back then it was a targeted listening protocol; one channel, one agency and one person that I wanted to hear. Pretty soon it evolved into listening less just for Dad but for what else was going on in town. Tom’s dad got a speeding ticket. Someone drove over Mrs. Jones’ front lawn again. The high school got egged. Pick up Billy at the bar so he isn’t late for the Village Board meeting.
Soon enough I started listening in on the other channels in that 8-channel scanner Dad bought from his friend. It also had the Sheriff’s department, the new fire channel (the FD had used the police channel until then) and a channel used by several police departments in the area. Oh, yeah, there were a bunch of towns that shared out town’s police channel also.
Then one day Dad put a scanner antenna on the roof, ran the wire to my room and plugged it into my 8-channel Regency scanner. Wow! I could hear all kinds of stuff from all over the Midwest on those same 8 channels. It wasn’t just our suburban area, it was Wisconsin, Indiana and, on summer nights, Iowa and Michigan. Again: Wow! It got even crazier when I got a scanner with low-band, now I could hear the State Police and sometimes skip from all over the country. California Highway Patrol, North Carolina and places I never figured out were coming in.
Eventually I became a radio professional, first as a firefighter/medic, then as a dispatcher and eventually a police officer. It was as a dispatcher that I started actively searching for activity rather than listening for content. Programmable scanners came around and changed everything. For years I had 2 types of scanning: content based and usage based. I would listen to my local stuff, targeting specific agencies. This was to keep up on what was going on around the area or things like railfanning or flying. I knew who and what I wanted to hear and bought crystals or programed frequencies specifically for them. Then I started using the Search function and started the second wave: Looking for what else was out there.
This brings me to “JimD56”’s post at https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/why-so-many-scanners-radios-pagers.500265/#post-4290431. Our good ol’ Lt. Jim discusses his usage for multiple radios. This radio for that, that radio for this. I hear ya, Brother!
At times over the decades, I have had as many as 30-35 radios in my shack and probably a dozen handhelds along with a half dozen in the car at any given time. Much like Jim, each radio usually had a specific purpose. Sometimes that purpose was that I really wanted that radio because it was just so cool (The AOR AR-DV1 comes to mind) but really had no practical purpose. Those radios usually did not last long; they were sold or traded for something more practical.
Things escalated when I moved across the country after retiring from my career job. I moved to Arizona and live within miles of the busiest fighter training base in the country. I am surrounded by MOA’s and actually live within one. There are several high-density jet training areas in the area. One of the papers I had to sign off on when I bought my house was to acknowledge that I live in an area subject to high-density jet training. I asked the mortgage closer if I had to pay extra for that. Boy did that confuse the heck out of her!
Now I had a dozen or so BCT15’s and 15X’s at the time, I had used them for Fire Tone Out searching and monitoring back in Chicagoland before I moved. I repurposed them for Military Air searching. I set them up for small segments of the Mil-Air band from 225-380 MHz. and would lock out any birdies and any active freqs once I identified them. By using logging software, I was able to see activity I may have missed when I was not actively listening and go back on monitor those freqs later.
I then did similar stuff for the local public safety stuff. The Phoenix area was pretty well sorted by radio hobbyists by the time I arrived here, but I was still able to find a bunch of new talkgroups and frequencies. I was a database editor, so I made dozens of updates. I then made contact with a guy named Joe, who lived on the other side of the Valley. He and I shared info and made a concerted effort to update the database even more.
When the new county P25 system was being built Joe and I took several day trips around the county to map out the various sites, finding the towers, and running logging software to determine the frequencies used. This county is huge, roughly the size of Vermont or New Hampshire so it took a lot of driving over several weekends to really map out the system. He and I built the system up in the database and over the next year or so we logged dozens of talkgroups and users. Joe passed away shortly thereafter after an accident, a tremendous loss to the hobby and to all that knew him.
Since then, I have rationalized my collection. Since I had developed a good handle on the local aviation, railroad and public safety stuff I cut down to “only” 10 scanners (4 536’s, 2 SDS200’s, 2 996’s and 2 260’s) in my shack, along with a couple ham and GMRS radios, as well as a pair of 536’s and a dual-bander in the car. I have a pretty decent collection of handhelds as well, but they don’t get used nearly as much these days.
These days I use the scanners mostly for logging. The SDS200’s are set up on the 2 main local P25 systems, one for the county and the other used by local communities. They are in “ID Search” mode and I check thru the logs periodically to see what new TGID’s show up, then try to figure out who/what they are.
The 536’s are used mostly for searching various bands. Sometimes I search low-band, sometimes VHF high-band. Skip on low band is still fun to listen to but there is a serious lack of activity there nowadays, especially compared to a couple decades ago. VHF high band is still pretty active, especially to my north, and the counties to the north of me are much less documented than things here in the Valley are. I am trying to figure out the myriad of fire channels in Yavapai County, what a convoluted mess that is!
The 996’s and 260’s are used for specific services that I am currently interested in: Railroad, Marine, Aviation and GRMS/FRS/MURS. Living out in the desert one would not expect to hear a lot on the marine channels but I have found that truckers love them out here. I also have my beloved R8600, that is usually parked on the local railroad channel when I am not twiddling the knob on it.
These days, when I am actively monitoring, I usually turn up the volume on one or two radios to listen for the activity I am then interested in. If I am doing something else in the office unrelated to scanning, I often just have one radio squawking. One trick I have used for years is to have Sentinel running on the computer when listening, I can then easily enter frequencies into a special Favorites List for future targeting and identification.
One question I have been asked many times is why I don’t use SDR’s instead of scanners, SDR’s seem to be a perfect tool for my kind of listening. They are probably right; I could probably do more with a half dozen SDR’s than a dozen radios and reduce the space occupied dramatically. While I have several SDR’s and have diddled around with them now and again, I just prefer “real” radios right now. Perhaps one of these days I will try to convert over to SDR’s like my buddy Rich M. has. In fact, I have a half dozen of his SDR’s set up at my house for his system. I have access to his wide-area system but rarely avail myself of the privilege. This brings me to my next thought on my monitoring habits detailed in the next paragraph.
Public Safety monitoring just doesn’t interest me much anymore. I spent a career of 40+ years on both sides of the aisle in public safety. I was a firefighter/medic, police officer, dispatcher and finally the director of our 9-1-1 system. I have been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it. Listening to police and fire just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
Railroad radio is pretty much the thing I ALWAYS listen to these days, and where I live, I have one radio permanently parked on the local BNSF Road channel and another scanner just scanning the rest of the rail channels. Over the last few days there has been a large and fast-moving wildfire about 15 miles from me, complete with aerial water-bombers and all the rest. I have pretty much ignored that, other than some CloseCall hits on some of their aviation channels. Since this fire is affecting my local railroad line however, they have been chattering non-stop and it has been fascinating. The line was closed for much of the day yesterday, and they still coordinate trains with the fire commanders. Crews have run out of duty time and had to coordinate taxi rides. Locomotives have had issues due to the excessive heat. Coordinating meets with the shortline to the west had to be renegotiated as the interchange is adjacent to the fire zone. It has been a great couple of days for listening here!
So, what’s next for me? Well, as I said before the obvious thing would be SDR’s. My dream SDR setup would be a small formfactor PC, such as a NUC or Minisforum, a decent USB hub, a half-dozen or so SDR’s and building a multicoupler like the one I built for the scanners, all on a rack shelf. (See https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/scanner-tales-rolling-my-own-multicoupler-that-is.491473/). In fact, that is exactly what I have now for my buddy’s system. If I really get into it, I could see this replacing the huge radio cabinet I am now using. I still like the old school scanner set up but I might give it a whirl in the next year or so. I could put all this in a small rack cabinet, or even in one shared by my buddy’s system and my network gear. It would take up a lot less room than my current system for sure!
This hobby is constantly changing. We went from crystals to computers, paper lists and books to online databases, I can even listen to scanner traffic from all over the country online. Who would have thought about the stuff we have now back in the 1960’s when I got my start?
