How many people are sporting hand held scanners in the car with them just to be informed of local lawenforcement activity?
I just got a hair up my booty for one and wonder whether it would help in my constant evasion of the" ticket"
Radio shack has a dual trunking 1000 channel scanner for 129.00 plus the 20 dollar frequency book and I could be hearing the popos for cheap.

 

all you'd hear is who's taking their two hour break at Starbucks.

 

I used to be an assistant manager of a RadioShack and we used to have a sheet of all the local scanner channels that we owuld give out for free. Just ask and they should give you one and you can save the $20 for the book. The book is filled with a bunch of useless crap anyway. Whatever channels the local sheet they have doesn't have on it you can find on the internet.

-Chris

 

JV, get your brakes yet?

 

whts the point of hearing what the dispatchers say on the radio?

 

Obviously you have never seen Fast and the Furious, you need them to wait and see if it is clear to start your street races.

 

I'm not quite the FATF age so I could care less about street racing scan tactics, but knowing when certain individuals are at starbucks when I'm travelling home from work is kind of what i'm getting at!
No, Huck , those brakes haven't arrived yet but you can't rush free gifts!

I guess I just need an excuse to get one of those silly things because I've always wanted one!

 

get this instead: http://www.turboxs.com/Dtec/dtec.shtml

 

uhmm you dont hear much on the radio, all they will say is ex. Adam 12 code 7, thats saying im on break. you wont know where they are because they dont say. so that really wont help you much. i still dont see a point to a police scanner. Unless you find it interesting to listen to police/fire and here the latest calls going out. The only point for one would be so you could hear if there was a report about a reckless driver (You), but why would you drive that crazy anyways.

 

it actually depends on who you listen to.

i have my radio programmed to the local "depts" and sometimes i just get so depressed from listening to it.

i mean all that can go wrong, from spousal abuse to missing kids. shootings and other crap like that.

some are just funny but that's rare.

there is a local yahoo group from bay area scanner geeks like myself.

oh, more and more agencies are using the trunking systems so an older scanner may not be so good anymore. trunking is where multiple angencies use a few frequencies. but they can "roam" those freqs since they are assigned trunk groups and ahhh... it's a little complicated.

even cooler is the newer digital system some are using. very clear and no static.

 

www.radioreference.com

but you need an account on there to start drilling into the meat of the data. and this is for the entire country.

for a quickie:

http://www.scancal.org/alameda/alameda.html

 

not really gonna help your there. by then it's too late.

wait... sometimes it goes to like $59... just gotta look around.

 

Make sure you get a scanner that has trunk tracking, so you can hear them even when they switch channels. I used to play around with my Uniden Bearcat scanner alot, then got bored of it. LOL. My friend has a radio that can transmit onto the police frequency. Sometimes he'll get on and say some funny ish to the cops. That's more fun than a scanner. HAHA

 

I used to have a scanner in my turbo prelude - I never heard much, except when there are major speed traps - then you'd hear lots of traffic.

The only time that it saved me was driving from Ca to Fl, I was doing just over 90 with a big rig following me when I heard the call from another unit saying look out for the small red car and a yellow big rig....We both pulled into a rest stop and I didn't leave for 45 mins.

 

I'm running the BCT8 in my WRX. The nice thing about it is that all the trunks you need are preprogrammed. The CHP freqs are all programmed by state. Alert light when within a 3 mile radius (when CHP repeater is used). it's better for long trips and as everyone states, it's the same old dialog most of the time. Kinda pricey for what it is and it's not for everyone. You can use it as a base station when not in the car, but mine is hard mounted on the console.
http://www.usascan.com/files/bct8.cfm