There are some places that restrict scanners or require some sort of permit. States like New York, Indiana, Kentucky and Florida have scanner laws, while rarely enforced, do restrict the operations of a scanner in a vehicle or some other places. There used to be others, Minnesota and Michigan both had permit requirements for years before doing away with them in the last couple decades. Most places that restrict scanners exempt ham licensees, and as I am a ham and not in the habit of committing other crimes, I don’t worry too much about it in my travels.
I had a Minnesota scanner permit years ago. My sister lived there, and I travelled around the state often. I went to the BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) office in the state capital in St. Paul and applied for the permit. As I was a sworn police officer in another state all I had to do was to have them verify my employment and the permit was issued. I also had a Michigan scanner permit some 30 or so years ago that I applied for by mail as I had family there and travelled there often. I never had to show them to anyone but kept them with me until they were no longer required.
My wife comes from Kentucky, and they have a strict scanner prohibition in vehicles. I was exempt due to my ham license but worried a bit there as well as Indiana, which I had to drive thru to get to Kentucky. A few times I saw police officers in my travels I asked them about it and each one told me that as long as I wasn’t doing anything else wrong there wouldn’t be an issue. I still kept a copy of my license in the car, even to this day. I also kept a copy of the state statutes in the car just in case, but again, never needed them.
I have also travelled extensively in Canada. While I understand there are some restrictions on digital scanners there I have never heard of any type of enforcement activities for that. I have travelled to or thru all 10 provinces and both the NWT and Yukon with scanners and have not had any issues. I have met a few RCMP and OPP officers over the years and they all said they knew of no restrictions on scanners specifically. I did a ride-along with OPP many years ago (they were still using low-band then!) and the guy said he enjoyed listening to the Missouri Highway Patrol and others that also used their 42 MHz. frequencies.
A long time ago (sometime in the 1980’s) there was a proposal in the Illinois state legislature to prohibit scanners or their use. Depending on the version of the bill as it progressed thru the process this could have been an outright ban in the state, a ban on mobile use or other variations on the theme. A couple of CARMA members, including the late Ted Moran and the equally late Jeff Zeman joined forces with some of the St. Louis area scanner guys and went to the state capital in Springfield to lobby against this bill. They were successful, the sponsors withdrew the bill, and it was never heard from again.
Fast forward a few years later, in 2010 an Illinois state representative proposed an act to “protect” the then new StarCom21 trunked radio system, specifically by banning rebroadcasting of the traffic. The wording of the early versions however was less specific and appeared to ban reception of it entirely. After contacting the rep, I was able to explain how the wording could be interpreted incorrectly and cause issues for legitimate scanner users or even public safety users trying to listen to their own traffic or that of their mutual aid partners. I suggested some changes to make it more in line with the actual original idea, to prevent unauthorized transmissions on the system. Apparently in a neighboring state some people were cloning radios on the state P25 system and selling them to others, mostly volunteer firefighters. This prompted a panic in Illinois apparently and started this bill chugging down the tracks. The StarCom21 system is somewhat unique in that it is not owned or operated by the government, but rather by Motorola and its users lease access, so one has to wonder if commercial interests had any play in this matter.
We worked out new wording and the bill eventually passed. It properly criminalized the unauthorized use of the system and eliminated the monitoring and streaming prohibitions. So far Illinois has not passed any new laws to ban scanner usage as long as you are not committing crimes. There are laws about possession of tools to commit crimes and I have personally arrested people for having a scanner while committing a burglary. I was also the guy that gets called at 2 AM to come in and see what frequencies the latest arrestee has in their scanner. I have been retired for almost a decade, and they still call me from time to time when they arrest a guy with a scanner. More often than not they had the wrong channels programmed, if they were smart enough to properly program a scanner then they probably wouldn’t be running around at 2AM breaking into stores, cars and houses.
Our original Mobile Video Recording Systems (MVRS) that we now call Dash-Cams used VHS tapes and 49 MHz. wireless mics. The audio receiver was a Uniden programmable scanner, I think they were the old BC560 or BC355N. When we had to change the channel, we would open the steel box and program the new frequency into the scanner.
Our system had a feature that allowed one to monitor the wireless mic in the car, this was used for our Field Training unit or “ride-alongs” to listen to a traffic stop for example. Occasionally we would hear other communications over the MVRS receiver. One time one of our guys was hearing what sounded like a bank robbery going down over the system so he hit the record button. He tried to figure out where it was coming from but got a feeling it wasn’t real as it sounded too much like a bad TV show. Soon enough he found two high school kids running around with air-soft guns and a third filming with a camcorder. We all had a good laugh, and the kids were asked to not play with realistic looking guns in a business district.
Another time one of our guys asked me to help with an investigation. They were looking into a crew working in town and suspected they were using radios (pre-cellphone days). I loaned him a scanner programmed with the 49 MHz. frequencies used by these walkie-talkies as well as some other possible channels like 154.570, 154.600 and 151.625. Sure enough, after a couple nights he found them on 49.875 as they were burglarizing garages. Collars were made, cuffs applied, and radios confiscated. Of course, he heard a lot of cordless phones and a few baby monitors along the way.
We had 12 squad cars and there were 8 49 MHz. frequencies available on this type of system, so a couple were used by two cars. This was dealt with by the mics having a set of 4 DIP-switches in them where you would set a code, so a mic on 49.875 with a code of 1101 would not automatically start recording of a car programmed with the same freq but code 0011. This was a pretty simple way to set up replacement transmitters. I still have a couple of these transmitters out in the garage and use them occasionally when needed, after 30 years they still work great.
When we had the 49 MHz. dashcam system one of our dispatchers, the late Tedly of some of my prior stories, programmed in the freqs into the BC780XLT scanner in the comm center. He worked midnights most of the time and traffic stops were the most common activity. Being a small town of about 4 square miles and with a Discone on the roof of the station he could hear most of the wireless mics around town. We even told the guys to leave the mics on after turning off the dashcam system once they come in with arrests so he could hear the activity in the lockup. (Small town, bored dispatcher; do the math.)
Later, when 800 MHz. cell phones came into prominence, and before the ECPA ruined it, we had a lot of fun with that, I covered that in other stories as well.
For a while I had an Icom R3, which also received video signals as well as regular scanner audio. We used that several times, occasionally finding hidden cameras watching ATMS (trying to get PIN numbers) or looking into windows for the local peepers. I found a bunch of legitimate cameras as well before they pretty much switched to Wi-Fi or other non-monitorable protocols. Like cellular listening, it was fun while it lasted.
Our agency had more radio resources than a lot of others. For one we had a couple guys who were into radio who ran the systems, so we always had good equipment properly programmed. In addition we had a decent budget for technology.
As a railfan I made sure we had the local railroad channels in our VHF radios. I even got a letter from the railroad permitting us to have the Road channels set up so we could transmit. With commuter trains running thru town this ended up being useful, we would get called by “Commuter Control” to meet a train at one of our 3 depots to offload an unruly passenger at least once a month, more often during events downtown like Taste of Chicago or Venetian Night, when well lubricated partiers would make Metra conductors nights more interesting. Some of our guys liked to listen to the rail channel and would often arrive at the train station long before the dispatcher got the call from Commuter Control.
We also had all of our neighboring agencies programmed into our radios, as part of the local communications consortium we all signed letters of understanding allowing access to all the frequencies. As the leader of that consortium, I handled all the licensing anyway. During the crazy T-Band takeback attempt about 15 years ago I was the name on more T-Band licenses in Illinois than anyone else. While that program was eventually ended most agencies had already started or completed relocating anyway, including ours soon after I retired, a process I started before I retired and helped out with even after..
We occasionally came across people with scanners on our channels, as long as they weren’t committing crimes we wouldn’t bother them about it. Occasionally we would get high school kids following us around at night using scanners to listen in, showing up on calls or traffic stops. It wouldn’t take long for us to notice them, being a small town, we knew who they were. While we tried to discourage them there was not a whole lot we could do about it but if I saw their dad in town, I would make a mention of it and that usually took care of it for that group, until a new crop of nerd would sprout. I actually met a good friend of mine that way, he was at the local quicky-mart as I was checking in with the clerk at 2AM and he recognized my voice from the scanner. He soon got a job as a dispatcher and finally retired a couple years ago, we still talk from time to time, we call each other “brothers from different mothers”.
We also had a large number of “Fire Buffs” in the Chicago area. Most are well known to the local police and fire guys and for the most part are well behaved and have earned the privilege of entry beyond the tape line when we could do so safely.
These days streaming apps have pretty much replaced scanners for many people, including criminals. While I am not really an advocate either way, I do understand both the arguments for and against streaming, and this is not intended to create any debate about that issue. The rise of streaming took off just as I retired. And while I have dabbled with listening to streams, mostly of rail channels, I am not a regular user of it.
Where I live now (Arizona) there are no laws against scanners although more and more police departments are starting to encrypt. While there is less encryption here that there is in Illinois where I lived before, it is spreading. There were a couple scanner enthusiasts that proposed a bill to require agencies to make their communications available to the public in real-time or a minimal delay (15 to 30 minutes was suggested) based on proposals around the same time in Colorado and California but as far as I know none of these proposals went anywhere. I think it is a great idea, if they want to encrypt the dispatch channel then fine but put up a delayed feed like Chicago PD did.
A few times as I traveled around southern Arizona and California the past few years I went thru Border Patrol checkpoints. By law they can set these up within 100 miles of the international border and, since I live about 120 miles from the Mexican border it is not unusual for me to venture down that way. Most of the time they just ask what my nationality is and wave me thru but a couple times the guy asked about my radios. I have no issue with that, he is just curious and wouldn’t have any reason to investigate them as they are perfectly legal. I usually just tell them they are “ham radios and scanners”. Sometimes they ask if I can hear their radios, I just say “No, you guys are encrypted” and they are happy. While this is true much of the time there is a surprisingly large amount of unencrypted traffic from the Border Patrol here I can hear from all over the valley. I live within a few miles of one of the mountaintops that hosts some of their repeaters and get CloseCall hits on their P25 system whenever I am in the car. About a third of the time they are unencrypted, probably due to user error. Not having the Secure switch set to ON is the likely culprit.
I do program my transmitting radios properly; to only transmit on ham or GMRS channels. I am of the mindset that if I have a police, fire, rail etc. channel in one of the radios I can transmit on they will be programmed to either not transmit at all or if for some reason that is not possible, they would transmit on one of the channels I am licensed for. I have no reason to tempt fate and I do not believe in the concept that some profess about in an emergency anything goes.
With that in mind, while I was still on the PD we did have the occasional interloper on our channels. While usually it was just a catcall or idiot swearing on the channel with a Baofeng or something, occasionally they would try to mimic our guys. We had MDC (and GE-Star before that) and being a small town our dispatchers recognized our voices, minimizing any real issues. One nearby agency had someone come up on their channel and say they were Chicago PD and try to run a 10-28, they were tricked into revealing their location by a quick-thinking dispatcher and promptly arrested. That ended up being the direct reasoning for that agency to go encrypted, the first in our area.
Of course, I always stress responsible monitoring, we all should. Like anything else a scanner in the wrong hands can and will be a problem. Most users are benign, it is that one percent that cause all the problems.
I had a Minnesota scanner permit years ago. My sister lived there, and I travelled around the state often. I went to the BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) office in the state capital in St. Paul and applied for the permit. As I was a sworn police officer in another state all I had to do was to have them verify my employment and the permit was issued. I also had a Michigan scanner permit some 30 or so years ago that I applied for by mail as I had family there and travelled there often. I never had to show them to anyone but kept them with me until they were no longer required.
My wife comes from Kentucky, and they have a strict scanner prohibition in vehicles. I was exempt due to my ham license but worried a bit there as well as Indiana, which I had to drive thru to get to Kentucky. A few times I saw police officers in my travels I asked them about it and each one told me that as long as I wasn’t doing anything else wrong there wouldn’t be an issue. I still kept a copy of my license in the car, even to this day. I also kept a copy of the state statutes in the car just in case, but again, never needed them.
I have also travelled extensively in Canada. While I understand there are some restrictions on digital scanners there I have never heard of any type of enforcement activities for that. I have travelled to or thru all 10 provinces and both the NWT and Yukon with scanners and have not had any issues. I have met a few RCMP and OPP officers over the years and they all said they knew of no restrictions on scanners specifically. I did a ride-along with OPP many years ago (they were still using low-band then!) and the guy said he enjoyed listening to the Missouri Highway Patrol and others that also used their 42 MHz. frequencies.
A long time ago (sometime in the 1980’s) there was a proposal in the Illinois state legislature to prohibit scanners or their use. Depending on the version of the bill as it progressed thru the process this could have been an outright ban in the state, a ban on mobile use or other variations on the theme. A couple of CARMA members, including the late Ted Moran and the equally late Jeff Zeman joined forces with some of the St. Louis area scanner guys and went to the state capital in Springfield to lobby against this bill. They were successful, the sponsors withdrew the bill, and it was never heard from again.
Fast forward a few years later, in 2010 an Illinois state representative proposed an act to “protect” the then new StarCom21 trunked radio system, specifically by banning rebroadcasting of the traffic. The wording of the early versions however was less specific and appeared to ban reception of it entirely. After contacting the rep, I was able to explain how the wording could be interpreted incorrectly and cause issues for legitimate scanner users or even public safety users trying to listen to their own traffic or that of their mutual aid partners. I suggested some changes to make it more in line with the actual original idea, to prevent unauthorized transmissions on the system. Apparently in a neighboring state some people were cloning radios on the state P25 system and selling them to others, mostly volunteer firefighters. This prompted a panic in Illinois apparently and started this bill chugging down the tracks. The StarCom21 system is somewhat unique in that it is not owned or operated by the government, but rather by Motorola and its users lease access, so one has to wonder if commercial interests had any play in this matter.
We worked out new wording and the bill eventually passed. It properly criminalized the unauthorized use of the system and eliminated the monitoring and streaming prohibitions. So far Illinois has not passed any new laws to ban scanner usage as long as you are not committing crimes. There are laws about possession of tools to commit crimes and I have personally arrested people for having a scanner while committing a burglary. I was also the guy that gets called at 2 AM to come in and see what frequencies the latest arrestee has in their scanner. I have been retired for almost a decade, and they still call me from time to time when they arrest a guy with a scanner. More often than not they had the wrong channels programmed, if they were smart enough to properly program a scanner then they probably wouldn’t be running around at 2AM breaking into stores, cars and houses.
Our original Mobile Video Recording Systems (MVRS) that we now call Dash-Cams used VHS tapes and 49 MHz. wireless mics. The audio receiver was a Uniden programmable scanner, I think they were the old BC560 or BC355N. When we had to change the channel, we would open the steel box and program the new frequency into the scanner.
Our system had a feature that allowed one to monitor the wireless mic in the car, this was used for our Field Training unit or “ride-alongs” to listen to a traffic stop for example. Occasionally we would hear other communications over the MVRS receiver. One time one of our guys was hearing what sounded like a bank robbery going down over the system so he hit the record button. He tried to figure out where it was coming from but got a feeling it wasn’t real as it sounded too much like a bad TV show. Soon enough he found two high school kids running around with air-soft guns and a third filming with a camcorder. We all had a good laugh, and the kids were asked to not play with realistic looking guns in a business district.
Another time one of our guys asked me to help with an investigation. They were looking into a crew working in town and suspected they were using radios (pre-cellphone days). I loaned him a scanner programmed with the 49 MHz. frequencies used by these walkie-talkies as well as some other possible channels like 154.570, 154.600 and 151.625. Sure enough, after a couple nights he found them on 49.875 as they were burglarizing garages. Collars were made, cuffs applied, and radios confiscated. Of course, he heard a lot of cordless phones and a few baby monitors along the way.
We had 12 squad cars and there were 8 49 MHz. frequencies available on this type of system, so a couple were used by two cars. This was dealt with by the mics having a set of 4 DIP-switches in them where you would set a code, so a mic on 49.875 with a code of 1101 would not automatically start recording of a car programmed with the same freq but code 0011. This was a pretty simple way to set up replacement transmitters. I still have a couple of these transmitters out in the garage and use them occasionally when needed, after 30 years they still work great.
When we had the 49 MHz. dashcam system one of our dispatchers, the late Tedly of some of my prior stories, programmed in the freqs into the BC780XLT scanner in the comm center. He worked midnights most of the time and traffic stops were the most common activity. Being a small town of about 4 square miles and with a Discone on the roof of the station he could hear most of the wireless mics around town. We even told the guys to leave the mics on after turning off the dashcam system once they come in with arrests so he could hear the activity in the lockup. (Small town, bored dispatcher; do the math.)
Later, when 800 MHz. cell phones came into prominence, and before the ECPA ruined it, we had a lot of fun with that, I covered that in other stories as well.
For a while I had an Icom R3, which also received video signals as well as regular scanner audio. We used that several times, occasionally finding hidden cameras watching ATMS (trying to get PIN numbers) or looking into windows for the local peepers. I found a bunch of legitimate cameras as well before they pretty much switched to Wi-Fi or other non-monitorable protocols. Like cellular listening, it was fun while it lasted.
Our agency had more radio resources than a lot of others. For one we had a couple guys who were into radio who ran the systems, so we always had good equipment properly programmed. In addition we had a decent budget for technology.
As a railfan I made sure we had the local railroad channels in our VHF radios. I even got a letter from the railroad permitting us to have the Road channels set up so we could transmit. With commuter trains running thru town this ended up being useful, we would get called by “Commuter Control” to meet a train at one of our 3 depots to offload an unruly passenger at least once a month, more often during events downtown like Taste of Chicago or Venetian Night, when well lubricated partiers would make Metra conductors nights more interesting. Some of our guys liked to listen to the rail channel and would often arrive at the train station long before the dispatcher got the call from Commuter Control.
We also had all of our neighboring agencies programmed into our radios, as part of the local communications consortium we all signed letters of understanding allowing access to all the frequencies. As the leader of that consortium, I handled all the licensing anyway. During the crazy T-Band takeback attempt about 15 years ago I was the name on more T-Band licenses in Illinois than anyone else. While that program was eventually ended most agencies had already started or completed relocating anyway, including ours soon after I retired, a process I started before I retired and helped out with even after..
We occasionally came across people with scanners on our channels, as long as they weren’t committing crimes we wouldn’t bother them about it. Occasionally we would get high school kids following us around at night using scanners to listen in, showing up on calls or traffic stops. It wouldn’t take long for us to notice them, being a small town, we knew who they were. While we tried to discourage them there was not a whole lot we could do about it but if I saw their dad in town, I would make a mention of it and that usually took care of it for that group, until a new crop of nerd would sprout. I actually met a good friend of mine that way, he was at the local quicky-mart as I was checking in with the clerk at 2AM and he recognized my voice from the scanner. He soon got a job as a dispatcher and finally retired a couple years ago, we still talk from time to time, we call each other “brothers from different mothers”.
We also had a large number of “Fire Buffs” in the Chicago area. Most are well known to the local police and fire guys and for the most part are well behaved and have earned the privilege of entry beyond the tape line when we could do so safely.
These days streaming apps have pretty much replaced scanners for many people, including criminals. While I am not really an advocate either way, I do understand both the arguments for and against streaming, and this is not intended to create any debate about that issue. The rise of streaming took off just as I retired. And while I have dabbled with listening to streams, mostly of rail channels, I am not a regular user of it.
Where I live now (Arizona) there are no laws against scanners although more and more police departments are starting to encrypt. While there is less encryption here that there is in Illinois where I lived before, it is spreading. There were a couple scanner enthusiasts that proposed a bill to require agencies to make their communications available to the public in real-time or a minimal delay (15 to 30 minutes was suggested) based on proposals around the same time in Colorado and California but as far as I know none of these proposals went anywhere. I think it is a great idea, if they want to encrypt the dispatch channel then fine but put up a delayed feed like Chicago PD did.
A few times as I traveled around southern Arizona and California the past few years I went thru Border Patrol checkpoints. By law they can set these up within 100 miles of the international border and, since I live about 120 miles from the Mexican border it is not unusual for me to venture down that way. Most of the time they just ask what my nationality is and wave me thru but a couple times the guy asked about my radios. I have no issue with that, he is just curious and wouldn’t have any reason to investigate them as they are perfectly legal. I usually just tell them they are “ham radios and scanners”. Sometimes they ask if I can hear their radios, I just say “No, you guys are encrypted” and they are happy. While this is true much of the time there is a surprisingly large amount of unencrypted traffic from the Border Patrol here I can hear from all over the valley. I live within a few miles of one of the mountaintops that hosts some of their repeaters and get CloseCall hits on their P25 system whenever I am in the car. About a third of the time they are unencrypted, probably due to user error. Not having the Secure switch set to ON is the likely culprit.
I do program my transmitting radios properly; to only transmit on ham or GMRS channels. I am of the mindset that if I have a police, fire, rail etc. channel in one of the radios I can transmit on they will be programmed to either not transmit at all or if for some reason that is not possible, they would transmit on one of the channels I am licensed for. I have no reason to tempt fate and I do not believe in the concept that some profess about in an emergency anything goes.
With that in mind, while I was still on the PD we did have the occasional interloper on our channels. While usually it was just a catcall or idiot swearing on the channel with a Baofeng or something, occasionally they would try to mimic our guys. We had MDC (and GE-Star before that) and being a small town our dispatchers recognized our voices, minimizing any real issues. One nearby agency had someone come up on their channel and say they were Chicago PD and try to run a 10-28, they were tricked into revealing their location by a quick-thinking dispatcher and promptly arrested. That ended up being the direct reasoning for that agency to go encrypted, the first in our area.
Of course, I always stress responsible monitoring, we all should. Like anything else a scanner in the wrong hands can and will be a problem. Most users are benign, it is that one percent that cause all the problems.
