I started my public safety career as a cadet for a small suburban Chicago fire department in the mid 1970’s. We had 2 fire stations, and we had several full-time (“Career”) personnel and a couple dozen Paid-On-Call (POC) firefighters. The main station was staffed with two of our agency full-time guys, usually a FF/Medic and a Captain. We also had 2 firefighters from the much larger town to our south that shared our station. They had 4 stations of their own and our station handled calls within the south half of our town and part of the north end of theirs, mostly for EMS and minor fire calls that could be handled with a squad/brush truck. Fire calls got an engine from the larger town, our ambulance and rescue squad as well as a truck from the main station and engine from our unstaffed satellite station using POC’s and recall personnel.
Our dispatch was handled by the larger town, and we used Motorola Minitors for station and personnel paging. We had a box of older Plectron receivers in the storeroom, and a couple of them made their way home with me when they were going to be trashed. Mobile radios were all 4-channel Micor’s, and we had 2-channel HT220’s slimline radios except for the ambulances which had MT500’s with 8 channels. The 2-channel radios had the dispatch (154.205) and state mutual aid channel (154.265), the 8-channel radios added the 2 VHF medical channels as well as the local Public Works/PD car-car channel and a couple neighboring town’s dispatch channels. Later we upgraded the rest of the radios to MT500’s set up the same.
The Rescue Squad and ambulance each had a Bio-phone radio, if the spare ambulance was used, we had to take the Bio-phone from the main ambulance and stow it in the spare. We used our older engine as the backup for the rescue squad and did the same if that was so used.
If you remember the old TV show Emergency, EMS operations in the NW suburbs of Chicago worked in very much the same way. In the 1970’s the burbs were starting to add paramedic services, but most used department owned ambulances instead of private companies for transport. Most ambulances had 2 members staffing it, at least one was a paramedic and the other at least an EMT-A or also a medic. The rescue squad was staffed by an officer and usually a medic. Rules at the time required at least two paramedics on an ALS call and one paramedic with an EMT-A on a BLS call. Soon after I started, all of our FT career guys were certified as Paramedics and all new full-time hires had to be. As for the POC guys we first got certified as FF-I, then FF-II. That happened in the first year with weekly training and monthly all-day Saturday classes. Next, we all had to be certified as EMT-A’s by the end of our second year. We were encouraged to complete paramedic school and/or Engineer school; the department would pay for the POC’s classes but not our class time. About half of us did one or the other. I got my medic certification as well as a Rescue Tech (2-week course with things like electrical rescues, water rescue, repelling and rope work and specialized ladder work) taught at the local Navy base. I was planning on going to Engineer class but never got to it as I was working full time and taking a full class load at the local community college. My intent was to become a full-time career firefighter, but I was getting sick of EMS calls as they were 90% of our activity. I then decided to become a police officer instead.
Now during this time my full-time job was as a police/fire dispatcher a few towns over. I started there right after I graduated high-school, in fact I had to delay my start date a week or so until graduation. This town was larger, about 40,000 people and we shared a police dispatch channel with a smaller town. Our guys there carried UHF Motorola MX320 portable radios, and the cars had state issued VHF “ISPERN” radios, mostly Motorola Micor or Motracs. There were a few old VHF RCA radios in the service officers’ trucks and the Chief’s car.
In the dispatch center we had a TPE console connected to base radios in the basement, I never dealt with the backroom stuff in the 5 years I worked there, at the time I was just a dispatcher. I did however help with light maintenance of the consoles by replacing lightbulbs as needed and helping the tech guy as a gopher once in a while.
A few years later I got hired as a police officer up the road a few towns. For the first few years I was again just a user of the radios but was well aware of what we had. Most of the portables were UHF GE “PE” models but we had a smattering of newer MPR’s. Portables were pool radios, so you did not have an assigned radio, you took whatever was charged and hope it lasted the shift. Cars had mostly GE Mastr-II VHF and UHF radios. Some of the auxiliary vehicles (we had 11 cars in the fleet at the time) had other GE radios like a Delta or Phoenix.
Over the next few years as these radios aged the fleet got really varied. Radios were expensive at the time and our budget was tight in that regard. We would get one or two mobiles and 2 or 3 portables each year. The problem was that the State Bid radios changed each year. This resulted in our portable fleet eventually consisting of a few of each model, including MPR’s, MPS’s and PE’s from GE as well as MX340, MX340-S, HT600, MT1000 and then HT1000’s and even a Visar or two from Motorola. Mobiles included GE Mastr-II, Delta, and Phoenix’s and Motorola Micor, Motrac, Mitrek, Syntor, Syntor-X, Syntor X-9000, Spectra (A5, A4 and A9). A couple cars had the GE portable radio converters in them, you would put your PE radio in there and it would then become a mobile radio. If you got stuck in one of those cars you hoped there was a spare PE available so you wouldn’t hop out of the car with no portable. By this time the fleet grew to 16 vehicles, including the Chief’s cars. There were 32 mobile radios of 12 models, one VHF and one UHF in each car, and 20 portables of 9 models.
When I was given the job of taking care of the radios, pretty much by default as guy who did it before had left rather suddenly, I really understood what a nightmare it was to manage such a diverse fleet of radios. I decided to rationalize the radio models into 2 types of portables (Regular ones for Patrol, smaller ones for bosses and detectives) and one style of mobile. With the money I was able to budget I was able to buy 36 GM300’s mobile radios the first year by leveraging both the purchase and maintenance budgets for mobile radios and then over the next two years I bought 30 HT1000’s and 6 EX600’s. By the end of the third year, I had two programming software packages (GM300 and HT1000/EX600’s) and 3 programming cables. Instead of the wide variety required before and only half the radios being programmable at all, we now had all programmable radios, of the same models.
Each car got 2 GM300’s, an ideal radio for us as it did GE-Star and MDC out of the box, the prior Motorola's had to have CSI boards added into them to do the GE-Star we used for ID’s. Same for the HT1000’s and EX600’s, they did GE-Star as well as MDC. We were already looking ahead as our 5-year plan had us replacing the old GE repeater systems (4 repeaters, 20 satellite receivers and 5 control stations for the 5 towns) and it was a good bet that we would end up with a Motorola system. That came to pass, and the old Mastr-II infrastructure was replaced with new Quantar stuff. The GE-Star decoders were replaced with MDC-1200, and it was just a matter of reprogramming the radios. The mobiles were easy, with the programming cable plugged into the mic jack it took just minutes.
With the new portable radios each officer was then assigned his own HT1000 or EX600 based on assignment. This resulted in almost a total elimination of repair bills, and we saved thousands of dollars by eliminating the expensive service contracts. During the next 10 years we had exactly 1 HT1000 that needed to be repaired after it got run over by a garbage truck. That cost about $100 to have it re-cased. The radio still worked but looked like hell. Same for the mobile radios. Those GM300’s were reliable workhorses, and we never had an issue. As I bought a couple spares for each band (VHF and UHF) if a guy spilled coffee or dropped something on them and cracked the display I could quickly swap out the radio with a spare and change the ANI ID with my laptop.
These radios were eventually replaced much the same way some 10-12 years later with CDM1250 mobiles and HT750 portables. Yes, they were inexpensive and pretty much bare-bones but the CDM’s were easy to swap out for the GM300’s (same power and antenna connector, just needed a new faceplate for the consoles) and they used the same programming software as the HT750’s that replaced the HT1000’s when Narrowbanding came around. The guys chose the HT750’s after comparing them with the MTS2000, HT1250 and a couple others. The HT750’s were liked as they were really small and simple to operate. These HT750’s proved to be just as reliable as the HT1000’s they replaced.
Later still we were provided a fleet of APX7000’s with the county and statewide P25 systems on them, the second band was UHF for our system. I was on a regional committee that helped administer part of the grants that the county had for their radio system that had a mutual aid component. Each police and fire agency in the county (200 or so) could acquire a pair of APX7000’s that had the state and county systems. Each dispatch center would get a desktop (mobile radio with a 12V power supply and a Mag-Mount antenna with these systems as well. This allowed each agency to communicate on the various mutual aid and tactical talkgroups and conventional repeaters and worked well.
Pretty much on a lark I applied for 35 portable radios for my agency and 50 for our regional taskforce, fully expecting to have the request denied. Eventually I forgot about it as the committee was phased out. A year later I got a call from the county radio shop, they had some radios for us. When I arrived the next day, there were a dozen large boxes all with my town’s name on them. I left there with over a half-million dollars of radios, chargers, batteries and accessories in the back of my mini-van. When I arrived back in the police garage the Chief saw me unloading this stuff and asked what was going on. I told him the new radios arrived. He had no idea we even were getting them. Then again, neither did I until a couple hours before…
The radios had all the County P25 talkgroups in them as well as the encryption keys so we could listen to and communicate with the county police. It also had all the various statewide channels on the huge StarCom21 system in use in Illinois. The UHF channels had to be programmed by me. As I did not have an Advanced System Key (ASK) I could not clone the radios, so I ended up programming about 20 channels in each manually, channel by channel. Otherwise, I would have had to have a tech come out and do it. It was a lot of work, but I did a couple radios each day and got them all done in a couple weeks before deploying them. They were still in service when I retired almost a decade ago. A couple years after I retired, they switched dispatch to Starcom21 and away from UHF and could use the same radios although I understand they soon got new ones since then since the APX7000’s were end of life.
The APX7000’s were larger than the HT750’s the troops were used to carrying but with the smaller battery were almost identical in size to the old HT1000. They were later replaced by the APX6000, the UHF channels were no longer needed so the APX7000’s could be retired. The last time I spoke to the guys back at the department they still had them in storage but used them on occasion during special events.
As a part of my job, I also oversaw the 9-1-1 system, in-house phones, radio consoles and repeater infrastructure. I was also heavily involved in our regional consortium, coordinating maintenance and procurement of an 8-channel repeater system spread across 15 suburbs. I built 2 9-1-1 centers, replacing the old GE 2500 series consoles with a 2-position ModuCom DOS-based computer screen system with an AT&T 9-1-1 system. 15 years later we bought a newer Windows-based ModuCom UltraCom Pro system. This included 9-1-1 as well as radio consoles and worked wonderfully.
In between we replaced the back-room radio infrastructure with Motorola Quantars. With 4 repeaters, a few dozen satellite and local receivers, a pair of comparators, 10 remote receiver sites, and 5 control stations as well as connections to 5 sets of consoles used by 5 towns it was a huge project. There were a half dozen of us on the committee that did this project, one from each town and a professional consultant. It was done on time, under budget and worked extremely well.
So, what does this all have to do with scanners you ask? Well, it gives a glimpse of how a small town, self-sufficient in many ways, handles radio stuff. Of course, we did have a scanner in the 9-1-1 center once I took over maintenance. At first it was a BC780XLT, later replaced with a BCD996T and then a BCD996XT. Some of the dispatchers used it to listen to the State Police or neighboring agencies, others for listening to FM radio.
We did not have scanners mounted in the squad cars but some of our guys had scanners of their own they would use, I of course always had one! Since I also programmed the car radios I would put in various ham, GMRS and railroad frequencies, the ham and GMRS were in hidden Zones in some of the radios or marked as “Unused 1” etc. in others. A couple of us were licensed in one or both so knew what was in the radios and could use them if they wished. I even added them to the VHF and UHF backup radios in the 9-1-1 center as one of our dispatchers was licensed on both ham and GMRS.
As “the radio guy” I always had a set of work radios in my personal car and another at home, when we went to the GM300’s I salvaged a couple sets of the later Spectra’s. Some UHF versions would work into the 440-ham band with no problems as well as our 470 MHz. systems, others wouldn’t go below 450 MHz. They all worked fine on GMRS. At a hamfest I was able to pick up a few VHF and UHF GM300’s for pretty darn cheap so I used them in my personal car and at home, I later did the same with 2 sets of CDM1250’s when we switched to those radios. It was one of the perks of being the boss!
I retired almost a decade ago now. I do miss the work and especially the people I worked with. 9-1-1 dispatch has switched to a central dispatch facility in a larger town nearby due to the state passing a consolidation law so the dispatchers are mostly retired or working new jobs. A few are still working, in a supervisory or Records role. I still keep in contact with them on a regular basis and when I get back to Illinois we meet at our favorite pizza place and commiserate.
Our dispatch was handled by the larger town, and we used Motorola Minitors for station and personnel paging. We had a box of older Plectron receivers in the storeroom, and a couple of them made their way home with me when they were going to be trashed. Mobile radios were all 4-channel Micor’s, and we had 2-channel HT220’s slimline radios except for the ambulances which had MT500’s with 8 channels. The 2-channel radios had the dispatch (154.205) and state mutual aid channel (154.265), the 8-channel radios added the 2 VHF medical channels as well as the local Public Works/PD car-car channel and a couple neighboring town’s dispatch channels. Later we upgraded the rest of the radios to MT500’s set up the same.
The Rescue Squad and ambulance each had a Bio-phone radio, if the spare ambulance was used, we had to take the Bio-phone from the main ambulance and stow it in the spare. We used our older engine as the backup for the rescue squad and did the same if that was so used.
If you remember the old TV show Emergency, EMS operations in the NW suburbs of Chicago worked in very much the same way. In the 1970’s the burbs were starting to add paramedic services, but most used department owned ambulances instead of private companies for transport. Most ambulances had 2 members staffing it, at least one was a paramedic and the other at least an EMT-A or also a medic. The rescue squad was staffed by an officer and usually a medic. Rules at the time required at least two paramedics on an ALS call and one paramedic with an EMT-A on a BLS call. Soon after I started, all of our FT career guys were certified as Paramedics and all new full-time hires had to be. As for the POC guys we first got certified as FF-I, then FF-II. That happened in the first year with weekly training and monthly all-day Saturday classes. Next, we all had to be certified as EMT-A’s by the end of our second year. We were encouraged to complete paramedic school and/or Engineer school; the department would pay for the POC’s classes but not our class time. About half of us did one or the other. I got my medic certification as well as a Rescue Tech (2-week course with things like electrical rescues, water rescue, repelling and rope work and specialized ladder work) taught at the local Navy base. I was planning on going to Engineer class but never got to it as I was working full time and taking a full class load at the local community college. My intent was to become a full-time career firefighter, but I was getting sick of EMS calls as they were 90% of our activity. I then decided to become a police officer instead.
Now during this time my full-time job was as a police/fire dispatcher a few towns over. I started there right after I graduated high-school, in fact I had to delay my start date a week or so until graduation. This town was larger, about 40,000 people and we shared a police dispatch channel with a smaller town. Our guys there carried UHF Motorola MX320 portable radios, and the cars had state issued VHF “ISPERN” radios, mostly Motorola Micor or Motracs. There were a few old VHF RCA radios in the service officers’ trucks and the Chief’s car.
In the dispatch center we had a TPE console connected to base radios in the basement, I never dealt with the backroom stuff in the 5 years I worked there, at the time I was just a dispatcher. I did however help with light maintenance of the consoles by replacing lightbulbs as needed and helping the tech guy as a gopher once in a while.
A few years later I got hired as a police officer up the road a few towns. For the first few years I was again just a user of the radios but was well aware of what we had. Most of the portables were UHF GE “PE” models but we had a smattering of newer MPR’s. Portables were pool radios, so you did not have an assigned radio, you took whatever was charged and hope it lasted the shift. Cars had mostly GE Mastr-II VHF and UHF radios. Some of the auxiliary vehicles (we had 11 cars in the fleet at the time) had other GE radios like a Delta or Phoenix.
Over the next few years as these radios aged the fleet got really varied. Radios were expensive at the time and our budget was tight in that regard. We would get one or two mobiles and 2 or 3 portables each year. The problem was that the State Bid radios changed each year. This resulted in our portable fleet eventually consisting of a few of each model, including MPR’s, MPS’s and PE’s from GE as well as MX340, MX340-S, HT600, MT1000 and then HT1000’s and even a Visar or two from Motorola. Mobiles included GE Mastr-II, Delta, and Phoenix’s and Motorola Micor, Motrac, Mitrek, Syntor, Syntor-X, Syntor X-9000, Spectra (A5, A4 and A9). A couple cars had the GE portable radio converters in them, you would put your PE radio in there and it would then become a mobile radio. If you got stuck in one of those cars you hoped there was a spare PE available so you wouldn’t hop out of the car with no portable. By this time the fleet grew to 16 vehicles, including the Chief’s cars. There were 32 mobile radios of 12 models, one VHF and one UHF in each car, and 20 portables of 9 models.
When I was given the job of taking care of the radios, pretty much by default as guy who did it before had left rather suddenly, I really understood what a nightmare it was to manage such a diverse fleet of radios. I decided to rationalize the radio models into 2 types of portables (Regular ones for Patrol, smaller ones for bosses and detectives) and one style of mobile. With the money I was able to budget I was able to buy 36 GM300’s mobile radios the first year by leveraging both the purchase and maintenance budgets for mobile radios and then over the next two years I bought 30 HT1000’s and 6 EX600’s. By the end of the third year, I had two programming software packages (GM300 and HT1000/EX600’s) and 3 programming cables. Instead of the wide variety required before and only half the radios being programmable at all, we now had all programmable radios, of the same models.
Each car got 2 GM300’s, an ideal radio for us as it did GE-Star and MDC out of the box, the prior Motorola's had to have CSI boards added into them to do the GE-Star we used for ID’s. Same for the HT1000’s and EX600’s, they did GE-Star as well as MDC. We were already looking ahead as our 5-year plan had us replacing the old GE repeater systems (4 repeaters, 20 satellite receivers and 5 control stations for the 5 towns) and it was a good bet that we would end up with a Motorola system. That came to pass, and the old Mastr-II infrastructure was replaced with new Quantar stuff. The GE-Star decoders were replaced with MDC-1200, and it was just a matter of reprogramming the radios. The mobiles were easy, with the programming cable plugged into the mic jack it took just minutes.
With the new portable radios each officer was then assigned his own HT1000 or EX600 based on assignment. This resulted in almost a total elimination of repair bills, and we saved thousands of dollars by eliminating the expensive service contracts. During the next 10 years we had exactly 1 HT1000 that needed to be repaired after it got run over by a garbage truck. That cost about $100 to have it re-cased. The radio still worked but looked like hell. Same for the mobile radios. Those GM300’s were reliable workhorses, and we never had an issue. As I bought a couple spares for each band (VHF and UHF) if a guy spilled coffee or dropped something on them and cracked the display I could quickly swap out the radio with a spare and change the ANI ID with my laptop.
These radios were eventually replaced much the same way some 10-12 years later with CDM1250 mobiles and HT750 portables. Yes, they were inexpensive and pretty much bare-bones but the CDM’s were easy to swap out for the GM300’s (same power and antenna connector, just needed a new faceplate for the consoles) and they used the same programming software as the HT750’s that replaced the HT1000’s when Narrowbanding came around. The guys chose the HT750’s after comparing them with the MTS2000, HT1250 and a couple others. The HT750’s were liked as they were really small and simple to operate. These HT750’s proved to be just as reliable as the HT1000’s they replaced.
Later still we were provided a fleet of APX7000’s with the county and statewide P25 systems on them, the second band was UHF for our system. I was on a regional committee that helped administer part of the grants that the county had for their radio system that had a mutual aid component. Each police and fire agency in the county (200 or so) could acquire a pair of APX7000’s that had the state and county systems. Each dispatch center would get a desktop (mobile radio with a 12V power supply and a Mag-Mount antenna with these systems as well. This allowed each agency to communicate on the various mutual aid and tactical talkgroups and conventional repeaters and worked well.
Pretty much on a lark I applied for 35 portable radios for my agency and 50 for our regional taskforce, fully expecting to have the request denied. Eventually I forgot about it as the committee was phased out. A year later I got a call from the county radio shop, they had some radios for us. When I arrived the next day, there were a dozen large boxes all with my town’s name on them. I left there with over a half-million dollars of radios, chargers, batteries and accessories in the back of my mini-van. When I arrived back in the police garage the Chief saw me unloading this stuff and asked what was going on. I told him the new radios arrived. He had no idea we even were getting them. Then again, neither did I until a couple hours before…
The radios had all the County P25 talkgroups in them as well as the encryption keys so we could listen to and communicate with the county police. It also had all the various statewide channels on the huge StarCom21 system in use in Illinois. The UHF channels had to be programmed by me. As I did not have an Advanced System Key (ASK) I could not clone the radios, so I ended up programming about 20 channels in each manually, channel by channel. Otherwise, I would have had to have a tech come out and do it. It was a lot of work, but I did a couple radios each day and got them all done in a couple weeks before deploying them. They were still in service when I retired almost a decade ago. A couple years after I retired, they switched dispatch to Starcom21 and away from UHF and could use the same radios although I understand they soon got new ones since then since the APX7000’s were end of life.
The APX7000’s were larger than the HT750’s the troops were used to carrying but with the smaller battery were almost identical in size to the old HT1000. They were later replaced by the APX6000, the UHF channels were no longer needed so the APX7000’s could be retired. The last time I spoke to the guys back at the department they still had them in storage but used them on occasion during special events.
As a part of my job, I also oversaw the 9-1-1 system, in-house phones, radio consoles and repeater infrastructure. I was also heavily involved in our regional consortium, coordinating maintenance and procurement of an 8-channel repeater system spread across 15 suburbs. I built 2 9-1-1 centers, replacing the old GE 2500 series consoles with a 2-position ModuCom DOS-based computer screen system with an AT&T 9-1-1 system. 15 years later we bought a newer Windows-based ModuCom UltraCom Pro system. This included 9-1-1 as well as radio consoles and worked wonderfully.
In between we replaced the back-room radio infrastructure with Motorola Quantars. With 4 repeaters, a few dozen satellite and local receivers, a pair of comparators, 10 remote receiver sites, and 5 control stations as well as connections to 5 sets of consoles used by 5 towns it was a huge project. There were a half dozen of us on the committee that did this project, one from each town and a professional consultant. It was done on time, under budget and worked extremely well.
So, what does this all have to do with scanners you ask? Well, it gives a glimpse of how a small town, self-sufficient in many ways, handles radio stuff. Of course, we did have a scanner in the 9-1-1 center once I took over maintenance. At first it was a BC780XLT, later replaced with a BCD996T and then a BCD996XT. Some of the dispatchers used it to listen to the State Police or neighboring agencies, others for listening to FM radio.
We did not have scanners mounted in the squad cars but some of our guys had scanners of their own they would use, I of course always had one! Since I also programmed the car radios I would put in various ham, GMRS and railroad frequencies, the ham and GMRS were in hidden Zones in some of the radios or marked as “Unused 1” etc. in others. A couple of us were licensed in one or both so knew what was in the radios and could use them if they wished. I even added them to the VHF and UHF backup radios in the 9-1-1 center as one of our dispatchers was licensed on both ham and GMRS.
As “the radio guy” I always had a set of work radios in my personal car and another at home, when we went to the GM300’s I salvaged a couple sets of the later Spectra’s. Some UHF versions would work into the 440-ham band with no problems as well as our 470 MHz. systems, others wouldn’t go below 450 MHz. They all worked fine on GMRS. At a hamfest I was able to pick up a few VHF and UHF GM300’s for pretty darn cheap so I used them in my personal car and at home, I later did the same with 2 sets of CDM1250’s when we switched to those radios. It was one of the perks of being the boss!
I retired almost a decade ago now. I do miss the work and especially the people I worked with. 9-1-1 dispatch has switched to a central dispatch facility in a larger town nearby due to the state passing a consolidation law so the dispatchers are mostly retired or working new jobs. A few are still working, in a supervisory or Records role. I still keep in contact with them on a regular basis and when I get back to Illinois we meet at our favorite pizza place and commiserate.