I grew up in southern Carlton County on a dairy farm between Moose Lake and Kettle River. With regards to the Minnesota State Patrol, when I started monitoring I had a Bearcat III scanner. When I bought it, the advertisement was a bit misleading. I forget the precise wording, but it was something like VHF-Low Band and VHF-High Band capable. As it turned out, it was ready to go on VHF-High Band. A separate module was needed for VHF-Low Band. It had a 10.8 I.F., so the crystals were not compatible with Regency scanners. I never did buy the VHF-Low Band module. But, I digress.
When I found out about the VHF high band extender in Sandstone, that helped me out a lot. If I recall correctly, it was on 154.680 MHz. Granted, I didn't get ALL of the State Patrol traffic, but I got way more than if I had simply used the actual 42.xx MHz frequencies.
This was a time when I was reading up as much as I could about radio and antennas. My first Citizen Band radio was a mere 23 channels and AM modulation only. I hade a 1/4 wave CB base station antenna. I eventually moved up to a single sideband radio and a 5/8th wave base antenna. That helped my CB hobby and was sort of a springboard for more listening opportunities, too. Because I found out that if I trimmed my old CB antenna to be resonant on VHF high band, it would increase my range. And, did it ever! I made the modification and installed the antenna in a very tall tree near our house. I started hearing things on VHF high band simplex and distant repeaters that I had never heard before!
I also found out about programmable scanners and made the switch about that same time. While I laugh about it now, making the jump from an 8 channel crystal controlled scanner to a 16 channel programmable scanner was a HUGE step, at least to me, back then. Also, having a SEARCH function was huge. Granted, it was slow by today's standards. The search steps were 5 Khz. However, it gave me the opportunity find new frequencies! Once I found them, I had another challenge, though. Who was the user? The Action Radio book and a year or so later for me, Police Call book helped, with public safety channels, but I wanted to know who the user was on ALL active frequencies that I monitored. Just finding the MN DNR Forestry repeaters on 151.265, 151.325 and 151.385 was a good find. In fact, the earlier Police Call books didn't help much with those until a few years later when more service were added. Pretty much the same thing with MN DOT. They had four repeater pairs on 151.xxx that were used with various PL tones around the state. Of course, I couldn't decode PL tones, yet, but I was starting to learn more about them.