A couple months ago in my last Scanner Tale I told the stories of some of the Scanner Missions I had done over the decades. Of all the states I haven’t lived in (there are 48 of these) I have spent the most time in Nebraska, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Michigan. A couple of these of these will be mentioned today. Having traveled extensively in the West over the past 4 decades I have played a lot of radio, seen thousands of trains and met hundreds of people. There was a girl from Billings that almost got me hooked but it didn’t work out, same for that girl from Santa Fe…
Nebraska, it ain’t just farm fields
Well, yeah it actually is but it is a fun state to travel in just the same. I love to go there for train watching. Driving along US-30 from Fremont to Cheyenne is a fun trip, trains every few minutes, lots of stuff to listen to on the scanner and the allure of small-town Middle America will get you hooked. Even my wife enjoyed some of these trips, but I had been doing them long before I met her.
One trip I took with my friend Matt was to the Omaha and Fremont area. We spent a couple days there catching trains and playing scanner. We stopped in a local Steak & Shake for lunch one day and walked in carrying a couple scanners, a map and our notebook. As we walked in a couple local cops were walking out and saw my Bronco II with 4 MON-51 antennas on the roof and a 10M whip mounted to the driver’s side rear fender. They asked what all the radios were, and I replied, “We work for the government” and kept walking. The two cops looked at each other and looked kind of confused and in awe. If they had inquired further, they would have learned that one of us was a small-town cop and the other was an equally small-town dispatcher. So, while I told the truth, it wasn’t exactly the whole truth. It was hilarious however, and that was the important part.
That same trip we spent a night in Fremont, Nebraska, just north of Omaha. We stayed in a Super 8 Motel, ordered a pizza for dinner, and went thru and found the PL codes to all the local public safety channels. This was accomplished by a combination of a couple BC760XLT scanners and a PRO2004 combined with a Zetron Model 8 repeater controller adapted as a PL decoder. Matt had a bigger interest in business band, especially in the 460-465 MHz. band, so he started searching out operations there. Back then this band was hopping with activity, from little 5-watt repeaters at local stores to big wide-area community repeater systems with a little LTR trunking mixed in. In small cities like Fremont there were several wide-area community repeaters. In the days before cell phones were ubiquitous and SMR trunking took hold, they were the way to go.
We found tons of info for our notebooks. We were both into GMRS at the time (still am 40 years later) and we found exactly one GMRS repeater operating in Fremont at the time. We talked to a local user on it using a Yaesu FTC-1143 (Matt still has his from back then and it still works!) While hams we weren’t really into ham repeaters at the time so didn’t investigate that activity.
On the return trip we decided to try to verify the PL codes on all the 460 MHz. police and fire repeaters across Iowa along I-80. It was pretty simple, we just programmed a bank in the PRO2005 in my car and watched the Zetron, looking up in Police Call what agencies used that frequency. We did find one outlaw repeater in Des Moines on an interstitial frequency (460.5625 IIRC) used by what apparently was either a fire buff or canteen operation. Overall, we found dozens of PL codes along the way.
On that trip, someplace along I-80 in Iowa we saw a humongously tall radio or TV tower south of the highway. We got off at the next exit and took the back roads to try to find this tower. Matt loved to find towers like this, we searched some out in Illinois and Wisconsin over the years as well. It took us longer than we expected to find this tower, it was a lot further away than we thought. I don’t remember the specifics, but it was something like 1500 feet tall. While not the tallest in the state, it was huge and standing at the fence looking up was dizzying.
Other trips to and thru Nebraska usually followed the UP’s mainline along US-30. Back in the day Nebraska was a haven for VHF Low Band, with the state patrol on 42 MHz. and most county and local operations on 39 MHz. While I could often hear these from home when skip was up, here I could listen to them locally.
On one trip I was headed back thru Nebraska on US-30 after visiting Cheyenne. I stopped for the night in Sydney NE, about halfway between Cheyenne and North Platte. I had been on the road for a couple days and really needed a shower. After I got out of the shower, I thought perhaps I left the water running but it was actually a huge thunderstorm outside. After I got dressed, I walked across the street to the “Dude’s Steakhouse”, kind of a famous joint in western Nebraska for dinner. Now this was late July and it was hot, but that storm left a foot or more of fine hail that I had to walk thru. It looked like it had snowed. The runoff from the rain formed rivers thru the accumulated hail and made it a chore to walk, even more so in cowboy boots. I got to the restaurant, and it was pretty crowded. They asked if I minded sharing a booth with another single diner. I had no issue and secretly hoped it would be the pretty girl I saw standing at the bar. No such luck, but it did turn out to be a local towing company owner who had scanners in his trucks and office. We had a nice conversation about scanners over a great steak dinner. I still would have preferred sharing the table with that little blonde though.
Wyoming: Coal, Mountains and trains.
On many of my Nebraska trips I actually was heading to or from Wyoming. My favorite railroad has always been the Chicago & North Western (C&NW) and Wyoming was an important state for the C&NW. First off there were the coal fields on the east side of the state. North of Cheyenne the C&NW and BN developed huge coal fields and built tracks to serve them. The C&NW came in from the south, around the Lusk area, building a new line into western Nebraska to connect to their friend (and later merger partner) Union Pacific. They had a yard office at a place called “Bill” and it was a crew change for coal trains in and out of the mines. Back in those days they were pretty cool about railfans and would let us know about operations. I even was given a copy of the System Timetable when I stopped in at the yard office. I had a hard time finding the road channel on my first visit and they told me it had change the week before. Once I found that out, I was able to pop it in the scanner and listen in.
On one trip out to the area I was chasing an Office Car Special train I had heard about on the scanner. I thought it was running EB thru Lusk on tracks that paralleled US-20. I was a good 20 or 30 miles west so I took some liberties with the 55 MPH speed limit in place at the time. I had a Mustang GT with a 302 V8 that I knew had a top end of past 140. I was nowhere near that when I was clocked by a state trooper heading the other direction after I crested a hill trying to catch up with the train. He later told me I was at 121, I told him if he was a minute earlier, I would have beat that by at least a baker’s dozen. Regardless it was the fastest he ever clocked anyone in his 10 years on the job. When I explained why I was speeding he said he had seen that train himself a half hour before and it was awesome. I was surprised that he had me sit in the front seat of his squad car while he checked my license and that he didn’t pat me down. I did tell him I was armed and “on the job” and he replied something like “Out here everyone is armed, we like it that way”. I parted with a warning, and we exchanged cards. I think the real reason I didn’t get a ticket was that as soon as I saw him, I pulled over and waited. I probably could have outrun him if I tried and we both knew it. I did grab a picture of his VHF Micor radio and made sure I had their freqs in my scanner for the rest of that trip. I never caught the office car train but did hear it on the scanner a couple more times.
On one of these Wyoming trips, I went out to Lander, where the C&NW tracks ended. At one time they had plans to continue out to the west coast but that never happened. At the time the tracks from Riverton to Lander were abandoned but still in place here and there. I was able to see the Riverton operations once before that line too was pulled up and operations relocated to the nearby BN tracks. Weirdly however there were never any scanner traffic for the C&NW that I heard there, I guess there really wasn’t anyone to talk to.
When in Cheyenne I always stopped at the huge “Wrangler” western wear store downtown, I still do! I have overspent there many times. It is one of the few places that carry a large selection of size 14 boots and “tall man” western shirts. Back before I was the portly fellow I am now they were one of the few places with a good selection of clothes I liked in my size, being a tall, skinny guy with big feet. I also found that they had walkie-talkies on 462.175 for several years.
Cheyenne has a rodeo called Frontier Days; it is one of the biggest in the world. I happened to be in town and had no idea it was happening the first time I was there, in the early 1980’s. I could not find a hotel room so found a campground and stayed there for a few days, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of my truck. I found tons of frequencies in use, mostly VHF and UHF itinerants and business channels by things like vendors, traffic aides, security and ushers. While I had extensive equestrian experience, I was not a rodeo guy, but it was fun just the same.
Other travels thru Wyoming had various purposes. Camping in Yellowstone, chasing trains at Cheyenne, Laramie, Gillette, Green River etc. and just traveling around for the heck of it. Of course, a big part of it was listening to the scanners. The highway patrol and many of the sheriff’s agencies all used VHF high band then, these days it is all on the P25 Wyolink system.
I did take one trip out to Wyoming back in the late 80’s or early 90’s to fill out my “County Hunter” map. A County Hunter is someone who strives to visit as many counties as he can. At the time I was missing a bunch of counties in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Idaho so I decided to fill them in. This is a popular hobby (see https://www.mob-rule.com/scoreboard?key=total&order=D) and provides another reason to see the country. Of course I have to have scanners going all the time. Between CloseCall, railroads and aviation they are pretty busy most of the time but there are places out west that one can go an hour or more with no radio traffic heard at all. One has to watch things like fuel levels and food supplies; there have been a few times I was worried about having enough gas to make it to the next gas station. I remember once arriving early one Sunday morning in a small town and sleeping in the gas station lot waiting on the station to open at 10:00 AM.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s I was really into VHF Low Band, so I had a set of MON-51 antennas. These things were 4 feet tall, and I had 4 on the truck I was driving. While my truck looked pretty weird with these monsters on the roof, they worked great, probably the best mobile scanner antenna I had ever used. They were the best for VHF Low Band and worked really well on High Band as well.
I later had a Chevy Celebrity, with a couple of these MON-51’s on the trunk and one on the roof when I was out on road trips. That Chevy was a great radio and traveling car. It was comfortable, got great gas mileage, had tons of room for radios on account of it being front wheel drive, and it was easy to install NMO mounts on. It was the first car I ever kept long enough to pay off the note on. I miss that car! It is actually the last CAR I ever owned; it has been SUV’s and minivans ever since the late 90’s for me.
While I don’t travel now as much as I did then, living in the Southwest these days I do get a chance to go to places like Nevada, Idaho, Utah or Colorado. Usually, these days the scanner is pretty much just along for the ride but occasionally I will go someplace mainly for listening purposes. The wife and I went to Pike’s Peak a few years ago. I suggested it to see how far I could hear radio traffic and make contacts on GMRS and ham radio, she wanted to go for the view. We got to the top and after the obligatory visit to the gift shop and staring out at the countryside I played radio for an hour or so while the wife walked around and filled up the memory on her iPhone with pictures and video. I was able to make several 100 or more-mile contacts on 146.520, was able to hit a bunch of GMRS repeaters across eastern Colorado and heard overlapping weather stations on all 7 weather channels on 162 MHz. I was able to hear some railroad traffic that I deduced was from about 150 miles northeast on the BNSF line around Sterling CO.
I have driven thru lots of out-of-the-way places in the West. Some areas are so remote that for good chunks of it even the Sirius/XM radio doesn’t work. I did find some interesting Mil-Air traffic going thru Nevada as several Air Force operations, including “Area 51” is there. Some small towns along the way have local radio networks, often on GMRS, and I have heard a couple resident nets during these trips. For those wondering, these are isolated communities that rely on each other for support during fire and weather events or other emergencies. Some are geared toward the prepper guys but for the most part they are just normal people helping their neighbors. I did find one net on a VHF business band frequency in northern Idaho. They had a repeater and the Saturday morning net started with prayers before devolving into anti-government rants and preparing for the inevitable federal invasion.
For those not as familiar with things west of the Mississippi, once you get away from the cities (and out of California) it is a whole different world. Outside of the inevitable weirdos here and there the people are welcoming, the scenery is unmatched, but the radio traffic can be sparse. I pulled off the road someplace in Montana to swap an antenna on the car and 2 different cars (well, pickups, I was in Montana after all…) as well as the local sheriff all stopped to see if I needed help. I suspect that if I were in northern Idaho however, I might have been shot.
Nebraska, it ain’t just farm fields
Well, yeah it actually is but it is a fun state to travel in just the same. I love to go there for train watching. Driving along US-30 from Fremont to Cheyenne is a fun trip, trains every few minutes, lots of stuff to listen to on the scanner and the allure of small-town Middle America will get you hooked. Even my wife enjoyed some of these trips, but I had been doing them long before I met her.
One trip I took with my friend Matt was to the Omaha and Fremont area. We spent a couple days there catching trains and playing scanner. We stopped in a local Steak & Shake for lunch one day and walked in carrying a couple scanners, a map and our notebook. As we walked in a couple local cops were walking out and saw my Bronco II with 4 MON-51 antennas on the roof and a 10M whip mounted to the driver’s side rear fender. They asked what all the radios were, and I replied, “We work for the government” and kept walking. The two cops looked at each other and looked kind of confused and in awe. If they had inquired further, they would have learned that one of us was a small-town cop and the other was an equally small-town dispatcher. So, while I told the truth, it wasn’t exactly the whole truth. It was hilarious however, and that was the important part.
That same trip we spent a night in Fremont, Nebraska, just north of Omaha. We stayed in a Super 8 Motel, ordered a pizza for dinner, and went thru and found the PL codes to all the local public safety channels. This was accomplished by a combination of a couple BC760XLT scanners and a PRO2004 combined with a Zetron Model 8 repeater controller adapted as a PL decoder. Matt had a bigger interest in business band, especially in the 460-465 MHz. band, so he started searching out operations there. Back then this band was hopping with activity, from little 5-watt repeaters at local stores to big wide-area community repeater systems with a little LTR trunking mixed in. In small cities like Fremont there were several wide-area community repeaters. In the days before cell phones were ubiquitous and SMR trunking took hold, they were the way to go.
We found tons of info for our notebooks. We were both into GMRS at the time (still am 40 years later) and we found exactly one GMRS repeater operating in Fremont at the time. We talked to a local user on it using a Yaesu FTC-1143 (Matt still has his from back then and it still works!) While hams we weren’t really into ham repeaters at the time so didn’t investigate that activity.
On the return trip we decided to try to verify the PL codes on all the 460 MHz. police and fire repeaters across Iowa along I-80. It was pretty simple, we just programmed a bank in the PRO2005 in my car and watched the Zetron, looking up in Police Call what agencies used that frequency. We did find one outlaw repeater in Des Moines on an interstitial frequency (460.5625 IIRC) used by what apparently was either a fire buff or canteen operation. Overall, we found dozens of PL codes along the way.
On that trip, someplace along I-80 in Iowa we saw a humongously tall radio or TV tower south of the highway. We got off at the next exit and took the back roads to try to find this tower. Matt loved to find towers like this, we searched some out in Illinois and Wisconsin over the years as well. It took us longer than we expected to find this tower, it was a lot further away than we thought. I don’t remember the specifics, but it was something like 1500 feet tall. While not the tallest in the state, it was huge and standing at the fence looking up was dizzying.
Other trips to and thru Nebraska usually followed the UP’s mainline along US-30. Back in the day Nebraska was a haven for VHF Low Band, with the state patrol on 42 MHz. and most county and local operations on 39 MHz. While I could often hear these from home when skip was up, here I could listen to them locally.
On one trip I was headed back thru Nebraska on US-30 after visiting Cheyenne. I stopped for the night in Sydney NE, about halfway between Cheyenne and North Platte. I had been on the road for a couple days and really needed a shower. After I got out of the shower, I thought perhaps I left the water running but it was actually a huge thunderstorm outside. After I got dressed, I walked across the street to the “Dude’s Steakhouse”, kind of a famous joint in western Nebraska for dinner. Now this was late July and it was hot, but that storm left a foot or more of fine hail that I had to walk thru. It looked like it had snowed. The runoff from the rain formed rivers thru the accumulated hail and made it a chore to walk, even more so in cowboy boots. I got to the restaurant, and it was pretty crowded. They asked if I minded sharing a booth with another single diner. I had no issue and secretly hoped it would be the pretty girl I saw standing at the bar. No such luck, but it did turn out to be a local towing company owner who had scanners in his trucks and office. We had a nice conversation about scanners over a great steak dinner. I still would have preferred sharing the table with that little blonde though.
Wyoming: Coal, Mountains and trains.
On many of my Nebraska trips I actually was heading to or from Wyoming. My favorite railroad has always been the Chicago & North Western (C&NW) and Wyoming was an important state for the C&NW. First off there were the coal fields on the east side of the state. North of Cheyenne the C&NW and BN developed huge coal fields and built tracks to serve them. The C&NW came in from the south, around the Lusk area, building a new line into western Nebraska to connect to their friend (and later merger partner) Union Pacific. They had a yard office at a place called “Bill” and it was a crew change for coal trains in and out of the mines. Back in those days they were pretty cool about railfans and would let us know about operations. I even was given a copy of the System Timetable when I stopped in at the yard office. I had a hard time finding the road channel on my first visit and they told me it had change the week before. Once I found that out, I was able to pop it in the scanner and listen in.
On one trip out to the area I was chasing an Office Car Special train I had heard about on the scanner. I thought it was running EB thru Lusk on tracks that paralleled US-20. I was a good 20 or 30 miles west so I took some liberties with the 55 MPH speed limit in place at the time. I had a Mustang GT with a 302 V8 that I knew had a top end of past 140. I was nowhere near that when I was clocked by a state trooper heading the other direction after I crested a hill trying to catch up with the train. He later told me I was at 121, I told him if he was a minute earlier, I would have beat that by at least a baker’s dozen. Regardless it was the fastest he ever clocked anyone in his 10 years on the job. When I explained why I was speeding he said he had seen that train himself a half hour before and it was awesome. I was surprised that he had me sit in the front seat of his squad car while he checked my license and that he didn’t pat me down. I did tell him I was armed and “on the job” and he replied something like “Out here everyone is armed, we like it that way”. I parted with a warning, and we exchanged cards. I think the real reason I didn’t get a ticket was that as soon as I saw him, I pulled over and waited. I probably could have outrun him if I tried and we both knew it. I did grab a picture of his VHF Micor radio and made sure I had their freqs in my scanner for the rest of that trip. I never caught the office car train but did hear it on the scanner a couple more times.
On one of these Wyoming trips, I went out to Lander, where the C&NW tracks ended. At one time they had plans to continue out to the west coast but that never happened. At the time the tracks from Riverton to Lander were abandoned but still in place here and there. I was able to see the Riverton operations once before that line too was pulled up and operations relocated to the nearby BN tracks. Weirdly however there were never any scanner traffic for the C&NW that I heard there, I guess there really wasn’t anyone to talk to.
When in Cheyenne I always stopped at the huge “Wrangler” western wear store downtown, I still do! I have overspent there many times. It is one of the few places that carry a large selection of size 14 boots and “tall man” western shirts. Back before I was the portly fellow I am now they were one of the few places with a good selection of clothes I liked in my size, being a tall, skinny guy with big feet. I also found that they had walkie-talkies on 462.175 for several years.
Cheyenne has a rodeo called Frontier Days; it is one of the biggest in the world. I happened to be in town and had no idea it was happening the first time I was there, in the early 1980’s. I could not find a hotel room so found a campground and stayed there for a few days, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of my truck. I found tons of frequencies in use, mostly VHF and UHF itinerants and business channels by things like vendors, traffic aides, security and ushers. While I had extensive equestrian experience, I was not a rodeo guy, but it was fun just the same.
Other travels thru Wyoming had various purposes. Camping in Yellowstone, chasing trains at Cheyenne, Laramie, Gillette, Green River etc. and just traveling around for the heck of it. Of course, a big part of it was listening to the scanners. The highway patrol and many of the sheriff’s agencies all used VHF high band then, these days it is all on the P25 Wyolink system.
I did take one trip out to Wyoming back in the late 80’s or early 90’s to fill out my “County Hunter” map. A County Hunter is someone who strives to visit as many counties as he can. At the time I was missing a bunch of counties in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Idaho so I decided to fill them in. This is a popular hobby (see https://www.mob-rule.com/scoreboard?key=total&order=D) and provides another reason to see the country. Of course I have to have scanners going all the time. Between CloseCall, railroads and aviation they are pretty busy most of the time but there are places out west that one can go an hour or more with no radio traffic heard at all. One has to watch things like fuel levels and food supplies; there have been a few times I was worried about having enough gas to make it to the next gas station. I remember once arriving early one Sunday morning in a small town and sleeping in the gas station lot waiting on the station to open at 10:00 AM.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s I was really into VHF Low Band, so I had a set of MON-51 antennas. These things were 4 feet tall, and I had 4 on the truck I was driving. While my truck looked pretty weird with these monsters on the roof, they worked great, probably the best mobile scanner antenna I had ever used. They were the best for VHF Low Band and worked really well on High Band as well.
I later had a Chevy Celebrity, with a couple of these MON-51’s on the trunk and one on the roof when I was out on road trips. That Chevy was a great radio and traveling car. It was comfortable, got great gas mileage, had tons of room for radios on account of it being front wheel drive, and it was easy to install NMO mounts on. It was the first car I ever kept long enough to pay off the note on. I miss that car! It is actually the last CAR I ever owned; it has been SUV’s and minivans ever since the late 90’s for me.
While I don’t travel now as much as I did then, living in the Southwest these days I do get a chance to go to places like Nevada, Idaho, Utah or Colorado. Usually, these days the scanner is pretty much just along for the ride but occasionally I will go someplace mainly for listening purposes. The wife and I went to Pike’s Peak a few years ago. I suggested it to see how far I could hear radio traffic and make contacts on GMRS and ham radio, she wanted to go for the view. We got to the top and after the obligatory visit to the gift shop and staring out at the countryside I played radio for an hour or so while the wife walked around and filled up the memory on her iPhone with pictures and video. I was able to make several 100 or more-mile contacts on 146.520, was able to hit a bunch of GMRS repeaters across eastern Colorado and heard overlapping weather stations on all 7 weather channels on 162 MHz. I was able to hear some railroad traffic that I deduced was from about 150 miles northeast on the BNSF line around Sterling CO.
I have driven thru lots of out-of-the-way places in the West. Some areas are so remote that for good chunks of it even the Sirius/XM radio doesn’t work. I did find some interesting Mil-Air traffic going thru Nevada as several Air Force operations, including “Area 51” is there. Some small towns along the way have local radio networks, often on GMRS, and I have heard a couple resident nets during these trips. For those wondering, these are isolated communities that rely on each other for support during fire and weather events or other emergencies. Some are geared toward the prepper guys but for the most part they are just normal people helping their neighbors. I did find one net on a VHF business band frequency in northern Idaho. They had a repeater and the Saturday morning net started with prayers before devolving into anti-government rants and preparing for the inevitable federal invasion.
For those not as familiar with things west of the Mississippi, once you get away from the cities (and out of California) it is a whole different world. Outside of the inevitable weirdos here and there the people are welcoming, the scenery is unmatched, but the radio traffic can be sparse. I pulled off the road someplace in Montana to swap an antenna on the car and 2 different cars (well, pickups, I was in Montana after all…) as well as the local sheriff all stopped to see if I needed help. I suspect that if I were in northern Idaho however, I might have been shot.
