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

[darkness975]

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.

 

[trentbob]

I hear you, with the knowledge you have now something to do in your spare time for fun would be to Google old Lafayette Electronics catalogs, they have them from the 60s in color Page by Page and you can read every word and see every picture. They are the coolest things to look at. The radios and the radio designs that you see are the coolest thing, you won't believe how much there is to pick from. There are also sites that you can Google old RadioShack catalogs year-to-year where you can read every word and see every picture through the 60s and 70s.

You'll get an idea why the hobby was so cool then.

 

[spongella]

Great posts. How about: getting hard copies Popular Communicatons and Monitoring Times subscriptions via regular mail, listening to police calls on Lafayette tuneable radios, Bomar crystals, Radio Shack's Battery-of-the Month club, the days when 30- 50 MHz band was busy, listening to KWO-35 when it first started from atop Rockefeller Center in NYC, listening to cordless phones on 1.6 - 1.8 MHz AM, looking forward to Radio Shack's latest catalog, when 8- 10 channel programmable scanners came out (bought one of from our local family-owned Radio Shacks), pilgrimages to the Lafayette Electronics store and Heathkit store, Tun-A-Verter ads in Popular Mechanics (wanted one but never got one)'

Great memories of great hobby.

 

[iMONITOR]

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...

Oh my!

 

[trentbob]

Great posts. How about: getting hard copies Popular Communicatons and Monitoring Times subscriptions via regular mail, listening to police calls on Lafayette tuneable radios, Bomar crystals, Radio Shack's Battery-of-the Month club, the days when 30- 50 MHz band was busy, listening to KWO-35 when it first started from atop Rockefeller Center in NYC, listening to cordless phones on 1.6 - 1.8 MHz AM, looking forward to Radio Shack's latest catalog, when 8- 10 channel programmable scanners came out (bought one of from our local family-owned Radio Shacks), pilgrimages to the Lafayette Electronics store and Heathkit store, Tun-A-Verter ads in Popular Mechanics (wanted one but never got one)'

Great memories of great hobby.

I can relate to everything you just said. Grew up in the Philly area, went to college in NYC and lived up on Long Island New York for 15 years then moved back to Philly so I always had a Lafayette Superstore right near me, not to mention all the Radio Shacks. They called it Radio Shack because it was an amateur radio store selling Communications equipment long before it became Cell Phone Shack. LOL

 

[iMONITOR]

Remember trading crystals like baseball cards? I'll give you my Detroit Police for your Detroit Fire crystal!

 

[Bob1955]

Remember trading crystals like baseball cards? I'll give you my Detroit Police for your Detroit Fire crystal!

Yes, exactly. Monitor Crystal Service(Cliff) is still in businessnin Watseka, IL for anyone that still needs Regency/Bearcat type crystals and his number is 915-432-5296 FYI

 

[DJ11DLN]

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..

Local PD called that "Code 8." The first scanner my folks bought, Bearcat III of course, actually came from KMart with a crystal for the repeater input, labeled Code 8, and the clerk explained that whenever there was something really serious going on and you heard someone say "Code 8, please," to just unlock that channel and hear all of the "classified" traffic. Unfortunately, while we could hear their repeater just fine, we were too far out in the sticks to hear the inputs most of the time.

 

[n1das]

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.

Technically everything still goes over the radio. Cell phones and MDTs are radios too. A modern cell phone is actually 4 radios in a single package...cell, data, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

If you look around, you'll see that radio is everywhere and much more so than when we were old time scanner listeners.


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[KevinC]

Technically everything still goes over the radio. Cell phones and MDTs are radios too. A modern cell phone is actually 4 radios in a single package...cell, data, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

If you look around, you'll see that radio is everywhere and much more so than when we were old time scanner listeners.


Sent from my XP8800 using Tapatalk

And sadly we are losing people that know (or even care) about the RF.

No one cares about the RF...until it doesn't work.

 

[LEH]

A lot of really good comments here. I have a PRO-43 that I 'modified' (as best as we could) to receive cell signals before they rebanded to higher frequencies. Of course the channel separation was never quite right. The PRO-43 only did 25 khz while cell channels were separated by 30 khz. It was kind of fun every now and then.

I do have a question for some of the older (like me) scanner buffs. In the mid 1970's I found a car mountable VHF receiver. It wasn't a true scanner, but had a dial you could use to tune between 148 and 174 MHz. It also had two crystal slots that you could select to monitor. I think it was a Regency, but the manufacturer really escapes me. It was roughly 6"W x 8"D x 2" H with a PL-259 antenna connection.

 

[n1das]

A lot of really good comments here. I have a PRO-43 that I 'modified' (as best as we could) to receive cell signals before they rebanded to higher frequencies. Of course the channel separation was never quite right. The PRO-43 only did 25 khz while cell channels were separated by 30 khz. It was kind of fun every now and then.

I do have a question for some of the older (like me) scanner buffs. In the mid 1970's I found a car mountable VHF receiver. It wasn't a true scanner, but had a dial you could use to tune between 148 and 174 MHz. It also had two crystal slots that you could select to monitor. I think it was a Regency, but the manufacturer really escapes me. It was roughly 6"W x 8"D x 2" H with a PL-259 antenna connection.

The Pro-43 could do 30kHz steps in the 800MHz cell bands. Remove D4 to turn on the cell bands and install it in the unpopulated D3 position to enable 30kHz channel spacing.

Be sure to only monitor communications that are "readily accessible to the public" (as a direct result of physical laws at work). Don't listen to anything I wouldn't listen to. LOL.


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[TailGator911]

Be sure to only monitor communications that are "readily accessible to the public" (as a direct result of physical laws at work). Don't listen to anything I wouldn't listen to.

That's what I used to tell my scanner customers when I managed the Rat Shack. I, too, had a fishing tackle box under the counter full of crystals for gobs of frequencies. I also made up a very nice newsletter of sorts that I gave to every customer who bought a programmable scanner, complete with a very detailed and informative listing of local frequencies in that particular area. They called me The Scanner Guy. It got ridiculous, more than 1/3 of the phone calls to the store were for me pertaining to scanners and frequency information. But, I was loving it!

Then came digital, of course....

JD
kf4anc

 

[trentbob]

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?

In a nutshell Milt, new is not always better. A lot of things are forced on us in the name of advancement and Improvement.

Life was simpler then with less external stimuli. A lot of the radio communication changes were mandated by government regulation and greed.

I guess it doesn't hurt, we were a lot younger then too LOL.

I guess that's the way Nostalgia always works, but boy does it work, ah the memories.

 

[Bob1955]

A lot of really good comments here. I have a PRO-43 that I 'modified' (as best as we could) to receive cell signals before they rebanded to higher frequencies. Of course the channel separation was never quite right. The PRO-43 only did 25 khz while cell channels were separated by 30 khz. It was kind of fun every now and then.

I do have a question for some of the older (like me) scanner buffs. In the mid 1970's I found a car mountable VHF receiver. It wasn't a true scanner, but had a dial you could use to tune between 148 and 174 MHz. It also had two crystal slots that you could select to monitor. I think it was a Regency, but the manufacturer really escapes me. It was roughly 6"W x 8"D x 2" H with a PL-259 antenna connection.

You got me on this one as I've been into the hobby since 1973! I'm drawing a blank but I can name all the scanner brands: Lafayette, Radio Shack, SBE, Fanon Courier, Midland, RCA, Regency, Bearcat, Cobra, Union and I'm probably missing a few more manufactures.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

A lot of really good comments here. I have a PRO-43 that I 'modified' (as best as we could) to receive cell signals before they rebanded to higher frequencies. Of course the channel separation was never quite right. The PRO-43 only did 25 khz while cell channels were separated by 30 khz. It was kind of fun every now and then.

I do have a question for some of the older (like me) scanner buffs. In the mid 1970's I found a car mountable VHF receiver. It wasn't a true scanner, but had a dial you could use to tune between 148 and 174 MHz. It also had two crystal slots that you could select to monitor. I think it was a Regency, but the manufacturer really escapes me. It was roughly 6"W x 8"D x 2" H with a PL-259 antenna connection.

SONAR? They had an interesting receiver that had rounded corners.

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[letarotor]

SONAR? They had an interesting receiver that had rounded corners.

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I've been trying to think of the name or brand of two crystal controlled scanners I had gotten from someone in the earlier 1980s. They both had a plastic casing instead of metal and they were a silver / gray color. To put the crystals in you would slide off the casing / enclosure which detached from the front face of the radio. I can't remember if they were 8 channel or 16 channel but I do believe they were 8. I traded both of them off for a 22 pistol in the mid 1980s when I had programmable scanners at that point.

I know if I heard the name I would remember the maker. But I just can't seem to recall what the brand name was or the model name. They both worked really great and I had to create a power cable for each of them. If I remember right, it was a three or possibly four pin connector that plugged into the back of the scanners.

I kind of wish I had kept the scanners since the 22 pistol wound up disappearing anyway somewhere through the years

This is going to bug me until I can remember what brand new scanners were...

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Sent using Google Voice to Text. Please excuse any errors I could not see or catch.

Brian (COMMSCAN)

 

[twobytwo]

LEH,You can go to sleep now . It was a Jolly Roger

 

[poltergeisty]

Driving though the drive-thru and listening to the drive in and people making their orders.

Listening to your old 40 MHz cordless phone.

 

[poltergeisty]

I can remember putting a Bearcat 210 on lay-away back in the mid 70s. I still have the scanner. Living in Santa Cruz County in California it was all you needed.

I did the same thing at Radio Shack for my Pro-2042. At the time it was $400. I put some money down on a super bowl pool and won $100 so that went on the scanner. Still own it to this day. Came out circa '97.