Sleeping with your Scanner?? 'Fess up, now!

[puerto0711]

Sleeping with my scanner

I cant beleive someone came with a thread like this....But this is the truth....I am single...and I sleep with the scanner on /ear phones and I sleep like a baby ....Is this is addicted ????

 

[gewecke]

Ok, I created a monster,me thinks.:lol: I took my vx-5r to work with me last night,so I get home this morning and I get this; hey where did you put that little radio last night?
Oops.
n9zas

 

[colby4601]

Always keep the scanners/radios on at night. I'll turn them down a tiny bit, but they never go off. Whenever I leave the house I always have some form of radio or scanner.

I have also developed the sixth sense of waking up when something big comes over the airwaves. It happens quite a bit.

I doubt I would be able to sleep without a scanner/radio on!

Colby

 

[kcoleman]

I guess I better fess up too! I hardly go anywhere without a scanner. And I'm fourtunate to work in a place where I can listen at work. And I too, usually have more than one scanner running while asleep.

Good Listening....
Keith

 

[NYRHKY94]

Taking it up a a notch!

This great thread got me thinking a bit and has now changed my "bedtime" scanning habit (aka addiction).

I'm a big fan of listening to multiple feeds at the same time (a true skill during the "daytime" hours. Typically this is a mix of live RR feeds from the various places I have lived around the country, along with my local stuff. Like others with this habit, I would use multiple instances of WinAmp on my PC to play the multiple feeds. The simultaneous sound coming from each feed of course, does present a listening challenge.

Well, that problem was just solved recently by Rob Dale with his great ScannerLive program! Now I can use 1 simple program interface to listen to 10 live RR feeds at once, with only one feed coming through my speakers at once. It's kind of like a "round robin" load balancer for scanner feeds. With this program, one of the feeds can be a priority so that you don't miss anything important while the program is scanning the other 9.

So, what does this have to do with the thread at hand, i.e. bedtime scanning? Well, short of having a PC next to my bed with ScannerLive running, I needed a way to pipe the sound coming from the ScannerLive PC down in my shack up to the bedstand. That's where this thread came in handy.

I looked down at my current bedstand setup and found what I already needed - a Uniden BC370CRS clock-radio scanner. Down in the shack was a Crane Wireless FM Transmitter going "unused". I simply connected the Crane to the headphone jack on my PC running ScannerLive, and programmed an FM station that was in the clear (106.0). Up on the bedstand, I set the Uniden BC370CRS to 106.0 FM, and BINGO, I now had the 10 ScannerLive feeds piping through the Uniden with crystal clear sound.

Now, I go to bed each night (headphones still required per the boss) listening to 10 feeds at once through one single piece of equipment on the bedstand. It also happens to be my alarm clock (He He). This is the ideal set-up for my listening habits, and may not float others boats.....but wanted to share this with my great group of fellow addicts here

Thanks - Mike

 

[ilgrant]

RE: Taking it up a notch

The only problem that I see here is that the neighbors stumble on the 106 FM and then become hooked as well. That makes you some kind of pusher!

 

[reedeb]

When I was active in Fire and EMA I would leave a scanner on 24/7. Now that I am retired I shut it off at night so I can relax and get a good nights sleep

 

[davidmc36]

I have actually been listening to a radio of some sort to fall asleep since I was about seven and built my first crystal radio. Nowadays it is a scanner (or two, or three........)

 

[ssd]

I sleep witw my mts2000 on and my wife sleeps with her gempa on so we have the radios on 24.7
And I never go anywhere without my mts2000. My wife loves here xts3000 when we go out

 

[NYCRADIO]

i turn my scanner my off at bed time spend some quality time with the girlfriend

 

[auxscan]

sometimes lol, I leave it beside me then when I wake up the first thing i hear the dispatcher. but never on weekdays usually on fri/sat night. then when it gets boring I fall asleep and forget to turn the scanner off. but leave it on a very low volume.

 

[ab8sn]

I usually have two running 24/7 here. One in the bedroom (Uniden 898) to hear about wrecks and fires and a Uniden BCT7 in the living room scanning most of the states law enforcement frequencies. I have several others that I use when needed but those two stay on all the time. I have been a radio/scanner enthusiast for 20+ years now. I always go to bed with my 898 scanning.

73s

Chad

 

[Code20Photog]

I used to, especially when I was the on call guy for the local paper I worked at. I actually subconsciously would only wake up when enough tones went out that it was something newsworthy. Then the guys at the FD gave me one of the pagers set for the ladder truck, if the ladder went in the middle of the night, it was probably going to be good.

 

[Austin4Wyo]

My best friend from middle school up into high school was the son of a local police officer, so he had a scanner on up in their living room all the time. When I'd spend the night, even though my buddy thought it was stupid, I always wanted to go up and listen for at least a little bit, usually about 3 in the morning when the weird stuff happens.

Keep in mind, this is a town of 1500 people in the middle of Eastern Wyoming, extremely rural, so not a lot of radio traffic, but he did have the local PD, fire, EMS, and WHP programmed in. There was no way we could sleep unless we went up and had a listen, video games and dumb movies be damned. His dad thought it was hilarious, because I didn't ever know what was happening (and his dad was usually on duty then, so he couldn't explain it), but I couldn't sleep unless I got a little bit of a listen.

Cut to last year, and who do I hear from asking if I still listened in (he knew I bought my Bearcat back when) and wanted to know if I had any recommendations on a digital-capable scanner to so he could pick up our states digital system? My buddy's dad. Hadn't heard from him in at least four years, but sure enough, I open my email one day, and it was him. He got a pretty good kick out of the fact that after all these years, I now own two scanners, and keep one at my bedside, given he always thought it was pretty funny that when I stayed over, I absolutely HAD to listen for at least a little bit.

 

[KB0VWG]

Scanners in almost every room

I think my wife is worse than me when it comes to the scanner, she tells me in bed the scanner is not LOUD enough and she told me to go and spend her $500 bonus check on a new digital scanner.. So I have to say I have the best wife ever and only wife.forever.







Kenwood 733, Ft847, Kenwood ts140
Marine Radio, Uniden 22510 Alinco Dr-120 For packet
Regency Scanner, Bearcat 8500xlt Madison Cb
Kenwood tk241, Pro 528 Bc396t Bct 8 and others.

 

[mibzzer15]

Well....its not me that listens to it at night, its my mom that takes it from me, pretty much "confiscates" it from me till morning so she can listen to it to go to sleep......i got a gre psr-300 for my b-day and have the whole county PD, FIRE, and EMS programmed into it. She used to be a paramedic for the area a while back. So she gets a kick out of listening to all the radio chatter and how it has changed......


I have a question now, what are these FM transmitters you guys have in ur computer that you can tune it to a radio station and listen to your scanner from a radio? Can someone maybe post a link of a few that i can buy? Thanks!

Have a good day, and just got a call that a motorcylist flipped and landed on the rail tracks.....possible helo incoming..im out....THANKS!

 

[Selanda]

I'll admit to it! *raises hand* That was something my mother started me on when I was a kid, she would leave the scanner on at night and I could hear it in my room. It replaced the sound of a refrigerated trailer unit from my days growing up in a semi doing cross-country produce runs. Without some kind of background sound I couldn't sleep so that was the substitute and it worked. When I moved out and down to here all I have for background noise is the PA turnpike (which I can actually see from my bedroom window) and the occasional jake brake stutter. I asked for a scanner to be put in here right after we moved in but alas he refused Nothing quite seemed to satisfy that void and I eventually learned to sleep without it, mind you cold turkey for that sucks.

Now I'm streaming my feed through my iPhone (via the "5-0 Radio Pro" app), on wifi and plugged in on my night stand, dual functioning as my alarm clock, streaming all night from the time I come to bed until the alarm goes off in the morning. I haven't slept this good in a long time!!! If my feed is quiet I stream Berks County but since that's been offline for a few days it's forced me to stick with Carlisle even though it gets boring after about 3am. When it's not streaming on my phone it's running through at least one PC in the house if not in more than one room at a time

 

[Cbear429]

I too have my BC245XLT on at night. During the day I mostly listen to one or two local channels because it’s very busy. At night I place it on scan thru all freq.’s in the bank and turn it down out of respect for my wife. She does listen to it also and loves it. When I wake up I find that it has been turned off. Oh well, we must compromise with my wife. LOL…

 

[Nightjock]

Thanks to this thread, I have started sleeping with my scanner.

Wait....

What I meant to say was...

 

[dracer777]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I always leave one of my scanners running on the nightstand. Somehow my brain filters out the mundane and will usually wake me up when something significant happens. Last week we had a small boat hauling 23 illegal aliens capsize in the surf when they attempted to beach the boat. This occurred at a little after 4am. I missed a few minutes at first but woke up and stayed awake for the next hour listening to the PD, Coast Guard, Lifeguards, and Border Patrol attempting to round everyone up.

Dude! I thought I was going insane! I leave the scanner on all night and I seem to wake up to keywords. Like disturbance, fight, shots fired, "officer safety info", and the like. Apparently I'm not the only one losing his mind