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Distance depends on too many factors to provide an easy answer, such as the elevation of your home, whether there are hills or other obstructions between you and the agency you wish to monitor; the transmitter power of the agency you wish to listen to, etc. These and other factors all play a part. Generally speaking, with a handheld or desktop scanner you can hear in a 10 to 20 mile radius, but that's not set in stone. What is Trunking? As public safety agencies and businesses grow they require more and more radio frequencies for their operations, consequently available radio spectrum has become more valuable and more difficult to find. To help resolve this problem, radio manufacturers developed trunking which works on the same principle as a trunk telephone line. Let's take for an example the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. This mid-size city used to have two or three frequencies for the police department and two or three for the fire department as well as one for public works and one for parks. Now, with their trunking radio system, they have upwards of 50 or 100 groups of users on 10 radio frequencies. Here's a listing of just some of their talkgroups: 04-041 Fire Ops A North 04-042 Fire Ops B South 04-044 Fire Dispatch 04-045 Fire Administration 08-041 Police East Patrol 08-042 Police West Patrol 08-044 Police Traffic Enforcement 09-006 Police Auto Theft 12-041 Water Department 12-042 Water Filtration 12-043 Sewer Department 12-044 Health Code/Sanitation 12-045 Street Department 12-056 Snow Emerg./Plowing 12-083 Traffic Signs & Signals One of the frequencies in the system is the control or data channel, continuously broadcasting a stream of computer data that sounds like a buzzsaw over the air. Every time a police officer, a firefighter or a sanitation worker presses his microphone button an instantaneous computer command is sent out to all the other users within that person's radio group to move to one of the nine available voice frequencies in the system. The channel the group is assigned is almost completely random so there's no way to follow a communication unless you have a trunking scanner that works on a principle similar to that of the actual two-way radio. Hence, the TrunkTracker. One moment an officer in the police east side traffic division may be calling his dispatcher on one of the nine frequencies, and seconds later that dispatcher may reply to that officer on a completely different frequency. So now, a small group of radio users, such as the Water Filtration division, can effectively have their own radio channel. It's not a frequency per se, just any one of the 9 available radio frequencies as long as it's not in use by another talk-group of users. The two major types of trunking systems are manufactured by Motorola and by M/A-COM (known as EDACS). A popular business trunking technology is known as LTR. Most, but not all, public safety trunking systems operate on the 800 MHz band. As the technology has evolved over time, each manufacturer has some different flavors of their trunking system. With Motorola you'll hear about Type I, Type II and IIi. Type I requires something called a fleet map to work properly (although these systems are gradually being phased out). EDACS has narrowband, wideband and SCAT. There are a number of LTR style systems, including one known as MultiNet for public safety (there is no scanner today that can track it) and Passport which is primarily for business communications. There is also some encryption on these systems which makes it impossible to monitor. All of it sounds very complicated and it can be, but here we specialize in providing you with the information to make it easier to set up trunking for your area and once it's done right it may never have to be touched again. Note: EDACS, MultiNet and Passport are trademarks of their manufacturers. Trunking systems can be complicated to program for novices (although our BuTel software makes programming much easier), but you'll find that scanning these trunked systems to be more pleasurable, interesting and informative than ever before. You can hear both sides of a conversation and you can listen in to just those groups which interest you.
What is Digital and APCO-25 all about?
By federal law monitoring private phone conversations is prohibited. No
scanners made in the last 10 years have been capable of monitoring cell
phones or are capable of being modified to do so. Most cellular phones are
now TDMA or CDMA digital which is completely different from APCO-25 digital
anyway.
Antennas - There is no better way to improve reception, whether for
base or mobile scanning, then by adding an outside antenna. For home or
office scanners we recommend a base station antenna, such as the Discone
for all-band monitoring. If you want to really improve performance on a
single radio band, check out our professional base station antennas, either
omnidirectional or directional for most receiver gain. Aiming a yagi (beam)
antenna at a station or region that uses a common band (such as 800 MHz
trunking or 460 MHz UHF) will pull in signals you never dreamed of. For
mobile scanners we urge you to mount a mobile antenna somewhere on your
vehicle. Getting the antenna out from under the steel roof of your car or
truck will provide a huge improvement. Not everyone wants another antenna
on their car so we offer various types and mounting options. For portable
scanners you can buy antennas tuned to specific bands (such as 800 MHz) for
improved trunking performance for example, but other bands will suffer.
Scanner Legality
How Scanners Deliver the News as it Happens With a scanner you solve all these problems. With a scanner you hear the dispatch* and then can generally follow the police and fire communications as they report from the scene. So with a scanner you learn of the news "as it happens" rather than relying on some news service to, perhaps, go to the scene and file a report. The media relies on scanners, too, so by using a scanner you'll know right when your local TV and radio station knows when something important is happening. With a scanner you'll also be entertained. Let's face it, listening to police chases live is unbelievably exciting. Hearing firefighters call for more water pressure as they're inside a building fighting a fire is thrilling. Hearing planes and trains be dispatched and routed is just plain fun. And in all cases you're admiration for the jobs these public servants and private professionals are performing only grows while your knowledge and understanding of their work increases. You can have a scanner on in the background while you watch TV. Some people even go to bed listening to a scanner at night and, over time, instinctively know and wake up when something exciting or important is happening - you can tell by the tension in the voice of the dispatchers and officers in the street who are communicating. Particularly for kids, when you're listening to a scanner you're practically riding along in that patrol car or you're in that fire truck racing to a scene of a fire. It's really mesmerizing, entertaining, informative and educational all at the same time. And, particularly for adults, perhaps those who are concerned about crime in their neighborhood or dry brush around their homes during the fire season, a scanner will keep you abreast of what conditions are in your area. Are police responding to suspicious persons on nearby streets? Do you hear the fire department being called out to hose down homes in the development a few blocks away? This is invaluable information that you can find nowhere else or not nearly as quickly. A scanner radio does it all. So we hope you'll consider buying yourself or a loved one a scanner today. For information, for entertainment, for peace-of-mind, and more. There's nothing like a scanner. Copyright 2015 Richard Barnett, Scanner Master Corp. |
