You Know You are Old Scanner Listener When.....

[DJ11DLN]

Great thread, really enjoying it. What I recall being a big deal was getting a BC560xlt in about 1989 and having sixteen programmable channels. Sixteen! And I didn't even have to buy crystals anymore! I actually had 3 or 4 blank for a long time, couldn't find anything I wanted to hear to fill them.

 

[DonJuanIII]

I believe the first scanner that I actually bought was a handheld BC220XLT (long gone) but I was always fascinated by the red-chasing-lights old crystal scanners I would see... So much that I started to find/buy/collect them starting in the late 80s. I have quite a few of them now - along with lots of crystals I can't use - but I still enjoy messing with them, etc.

 

[CrabbyMilton]

There is plenty to hear and people have been saying that scanning is in it's last days forever now.
You always have to ask yourself that if things in terms of products and services were better in the old days, then why did they cease to exist?

 

[Station51]

My first "monitor" (scanners didn't exist) was a Regency Monitoradio (see pic). Purchased in 1968
You had to order crystals from Texas Crystals and then SOLDER them in!
I still have the tunable version of this radio, but it just sits as garage art lol

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

A lot of activity back then that will never be heard now because of technology and encryption.

I got into it with an old tunable VHF Recency Monitoradio. Heard a lot of interesting stuff on Metropolitan Enforcement Group that would be encrypted today. Stakeout a block from my house in Chicago. They were tailing a guy and calling out the first letter of the street names in my corner of town. I went outside and watched the suspect and his tail drive by!

Then monitoring UHF DEA, much more tailing activity and cloak and dagger.

Moved to Miami and the stuff I heard HF, VHF and UHF was amazing. The cocaine cowboys were about and stuff was happening above and around me. Once a boat got intercepted on a waterway near my house. I biked over and watched the action from a bridge while an undercover DEA guy stood next to me. I recognized his undercover Camaro parked below by the normally unnecessary disguise cowal mount antenna. I asked him, is that your car?

I moved onto monitoring air to ground phones, AF1 and satellites. Military satellites, NASA ATS-3. I have tapes of round table discussions by the Bahii church using ATS-3 to communicate around several Pacific islands.

INMARSAT was particularly interesting. I listened to some pretty nefarious political shenanigans during the first Gulf War. People in power actually make nasty crap up and leak to major newspapers to frighten and influence masses to accept war. I heard it first hand.

My most memorable experience was driving to the Indianapolis 500 with my Bearcat 210 scanning low band. I was hearing CHP loud and clear!



Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk

 

[jimvm]

My first scanner was a Motorola T44 UHF receiver. I pulled out the crystal and put in a small coil in it's place.
The oscillator would drift around and when a signal was found, the AFC would hold it tuned.
Also used a small oscillating fan to sweep past the coil thus tuning the Rcvr!

jim vm

 

[JPOMP]

What a great thread. The memories if brings back of the days when scanning was simple. I remember my first scanner as a teen was the Radio Shack Pro4 pocket scan VHF hi band which used crystals. Police and fire in my home town were both on VHF high band at that time. I literally had that scanner on constantly. It was a time when scanning was a lot of fun and simple.

 

[jharr465]

I started listening in 1968 in North Carolina using a converter that had two crystals in it and was rubber banded to a small fm broadcast receiver. It down converted the polie channels to a frequency in the broadcast band. I bought it at KMart in High Point, North Carolina. After that I was hooked! I was in the Air Force at the time and always had at least one scanner everywhere I went, including overseas. Loved listening to the base communications. I always knew what was going on.

 

[doctordialtone]

I bought it at KMart

Don't you mean "Kresge's"?

S. S. Kresge - Wikipedia

 

[Giddyuptd]

8 or 16 channel scanners, you heard it all on one and all you needed.

 

[kittrav]

Remember setting the Electra Bearcat 101 slide switches to program a frequency from the "look up" instructions?

 

[doctordialtone]

I had the Realistic 16 channel model (Late 70's) that used 16 DIP switches to set the frequencies.

The book to look up the codes was 1/2 inch thick!

 

[trap5858]

Remember setting the Electra Bearcat 101 slide switches to program a frequency from the "look up" instructions?

I remember that exercise very well and also having a list taped to the top of the scanner so I knew at a glance who was on that channel and also a list of programming instructions for the various places I would visit with the scanner.

 

[nacsr]

Our local would tell dispatch to turn off the repeater when they didn't want everyone to hear them. If you were close enough you could still hear them on the repeater input frequency. Hillbilly encryption I guess..

 

[trentbob]

Or when a birdie would pop up on one of the government bands, you thought at first that the transmission was coming from some super secret bunker someplace.

This thread is awesome, but also depressing.

I didn't live through those times as I am much younger than a lot here but I wish I had. Scanning (and life overall) was much simpler back then.

Every day I listen to my units I have this feeling of dread that it will be my last ...

You're right Milton, I remember Tom's secret registry of government frequencies when it first came out from crb research, I'd always be looking with my tunable VHF High monitor in the 167 megs area for a guy who sounded like Efrem Zimbalist jr. LOL

Darkness, you have no idea how different life was then, the best way to explain it... we didn't have mobile phones, texting, cable, internet and other things we take for granted but if you were cool you had a CB radio and kept in touch with your friends. We had three channels on television until UHF was introduced and if you were lucky you got one or more channels added in the 60s

There was nothing like shortwave listening from around the world but you know there for a while, and I know what you're concerned about, we couldn't hear a lot on shortwave radio because of loud humming noises covering up the broadcast. Especially affected was VOA or Voice of America. It was called jamming from behind the Iron Curtain and we did it too on Radio Moscow, Radio Kiev and of course Radio Havana. That was during the Cold War.

I also remember them throwing a switch on VHF High repeater systems where you couldn't hear the input frequency you could only hear the dispatcher but you couldn't hear the cars unless you were close enough to hear the input frequency in simplex mode. That didn't last long in my hometown County because the cops complained also because they couldn't hear the cars either.

The reason talking about this on this thread it's so enjoyable is these are things we don't think about anymore...not at all. When we're Gone nobody will know about this stuff.

 

[TailGator911]

Funny story (but then again not) about 49mhz cordless phones - my wife and I would often hear one of our neighbors call the 900 sex line, give his Visa number, then you can use your imagination. It was a live sex line. We howled with laughter at first, but then it got really weird when we heard him call and threaten and harass people at random, he would say really weird sexual things. Never knew where his exact location was until one morning he called AAA for a vehicle lockout and gave his address - across the street, one house to the right. About that time my son (10 y/o) was getting into the entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to mow lawns for extra money so I bought him an El Toro and off he went to our neighbors to market. I warned him accordingly not to approach that particular neighbor. Couple of months later the guy was raided and on the news, arrested in a huge nationwide child porn ring. My wife never questioned why I needed so many radios ever again. lol

JD
kf4anc

 

[trentbob]

All you had to do was cut a diode in GRE made Radio Shack scanners and you were in business listening to cell phones. It didn't trunk but there were so few analog 800 megahertz cell phones then you can hear both sides of conversations just by limit searching the assigned parameters.

In the early evening, I would love the calls where the guy would call the wife and say that he was going to have to work late and he was sorry he was missing dinner but the boss wanted him to work on this project or something or other.

And of course then the same guy would make the booty call to the girlfriend and go and visit her.

Of course when I first started the Hobby in the mid-to-late 60s as a teen there were mobile phone operators in the 152 megahertz area and mobile phones worked just like Marine phones did.

 

[6079smithw]

Way back when, if you wanted to know what was REALLY going on in your neighborhood you would have one scanner on search mode in the 46-49mhz band - cordless phones and baby monitors, yup. The things we heard...

True Dat! In the late 70's I had a brand-new BC-210 connected to a old CB ground plane cut down to 42 mHz so I could monitor NV Highway Patrol. The thing also pulled in 49 mHz very well. There was a small apartment next block over with a baby monitor running 24/7.
Seems Mom and Dad slept in the same room as the baby... made for some unique late-night listening, especially on weekends...

30-50 was pretty active 'Back in the Day'!

 

[trap5858]

I started listening in 1968 in North Carolina using a converter that had two crystals in it and was rubber banded to a small fm broadcast receiver. It down converted the polie channels to a frequency in the broadcast band. I bought it at KMart in High Point, North Carolina. After that I was hooked! I was in the Air Force at the time and always had at least one scanner everywhere I went, including overseas. Loved listening to the base communications. I always knew what was going on.

I had one of those converters. It was given to me by the chief of police of Harvey Cedars New Jersey. This was when the police appreciated citizens with both eyes and ears.

 

[nyscan]

One of the best things about monitoring before cell phones is that everything went over the radio. Now we actually miss a lot because it goes over a cell phone or MDT.