scanners

Here I come with a ???? If I buy a scanner what would it be??

Not nearly enough info. Do you need digital capabilities or will analog work? What freqs do you need? What do you want to do with it?

Just want to Noisy af listen to Ham Radio traffic.An emerency messages. As you can tell I know nothing. But I did decde on a transciever. I guess analog is cheaper.

Best Regards Ron

A scanner can cycle through the channels faster but depending on how many channels you are trying to listen to it may just be better to use your radios scan mode. Most all radios can be programmed by computers which makes managing freqs much easier.

Very good. I did not know the trancievers have a scan funtion. I plan on buying a Yaesu ft 60 r .

Best Regards Ron

There are very important differences between all the things you mention, OP.

I've seen these threads before, though, and our long explanations were mostly ignored, so I'm reluctant to take the time for you.

But if you're genuinely curious, and need info to make decisions you haven't already made, just say so.

Where I live all the PS is old school analog, the FT-60 does alright.

Yes I am interested. I have decided on a transcieveerr.(yaesu ft 60r) . And wonder if I need a scanner? In my youth I had a Channel Master Am, SW Radio I listened to every night. Mostly BBC. And the Radio Shack Catologs, Filled with Heath Kits , That I lusted over but never could buy.So Thank You

Best Regards Ron

Don't get discouraged. What JB is talking about can be seen on the first couple pages of this forum. There are 2 or 3 what HT should i buy. That question comes about once a month. The stickies above could be published into a book thanks to arjedi.

But if you are still thinking about a scanner im looking at the uniden bearcat 5000 i think. Its about 200 bucks but it has cat control so you can control it from your computer so that you can you software for trucking modes and the reason i want it is to rx satellites and it adjust for doplar shift.

Right now i have an older nascar bearcat handheld. I like it but programming freqs is a pain. If you haven't yet goto radioreferance and see what they have in your area as far as public frequencies.

There are a few here that own the ft60 so maybe they can talk about how good its scan is. But if you only have 10-20 channels you want to monitor i would think hard about holding off on a scanner at this point. But if you just have to have one check out swap qth and eham

Okay.

First off, consider whether you really want to start off with a handheld radio. Handhelds have low power and tiny antennas; these factors combine to give them dreadful performance when transmitting. You might easily fail to reach a repeater only five miles away, despite being able to listen to that same repeater from more than twenty miles away. Plus, handhelds are very difficult to use in cars without an externally mounted antenna, due to the faraday cage effect.
Many hams, myself included, recommend starting with a mobile or base radio. Mobile is really nice because it's always there to be used when you're driving, unlike a base radio which will tend to be an "I'd use this at my desk but I'd have to set it up first so blah" thing. Plus, it's actually a little easier to cram a mobile radio into a car or truck, since they already have a 12-volt battery and charger and a nice ground plane for the antenna, plus existing through-firewall fittings to pass power and possibly antenna cables. Odds are good that your house/apartment lacks many if not all of those things, making a base radio install a little more complicated.

I won't get into the ability of a rare few mobile radios to crossband repeat from a handheld, when they're running, but read up on that yourself. It might influence your mobile radio selection.

There's a good ham radio 101 tacked thread in here, so read that.

I assume you have a ham license if you're talking about radio selection. If not, end this conversation, get your license, then come back.

So far, I haven't mentioned HF, since the antenna requirements are more complex than VHF/UHF. But some people do operate HF mobile, and while the radios are considerably more expensive than simple dual or monobanders, HF mobile rigs usually also have rudimentary VHF/UHF capabilities (generally with a separate antenna jack), and can be a good one-size-fits-all base station option. But I wouldn't keep one in the truck unless I intended to use it for HF as well, since it's a $1000+ radio vs a dual band's $300ish, plus it has a more complex interface, less well-suited to VHF/UHF operation, and besides all that it's simply bigger.

One of the big operating differences between HF and VHF/UHF is that HF is point-to-point-oriented, like say email, while VHF/UHF is usually repeater-oriented, like say arfcom. In HF, you look for frequencies with activity or with potential activity, which means you're hunting through a fair portion of a band using a sensitive tuning dial. In VHF/UHF, you're instead checking repeater frequencies, which you preprogram into your radio (along with their input offsets and squelch codes and tones and whatever) and then access often with up/down buttons or direct key input.

It's hard to explain until you see them in use, but an HF radio with VHF/UHF capability is usually not the most intuitive VHF/UHF radio imaginable.

If you don't know why HF and VHF/UHF work so differently, consult the 101 thread. But, basically, HF repeaters are basically nonexistent due to the unpredictable nature of HF propogation. Sometimes you can hit listening stations 400 miles away but not 300 or 500, other times you can hit 700 but not 400. So there's no optimal location to put repeaters. Since VHF/UHF are line-of-sight, the problem set simplifies to "let's just put the antenna on the highest tower/building/hill in town" and then everyone in town can hit it.

Okay, so that's your ham radio info and suggestion, some type of mobile radio, preferrably VHF/UHF exclusively unless you're ready for HF. The more you move away from that starting point, the less likely you are to be satisfied with your new hobby.

Now, as handhelds go, I do like the FT-60R. It has aftermarket AA battery cases allowing for high power operation from 6 AA batteries rather than from a flaky rechargeable pack, though even high power from a handheld is miniscule compared to a decent mobile radio. FT-60R max output power is like 5 watts, my mobile IC-208h by comparison is a beast, pouring out 55 watts peak, an 11-fold increase. Never mind that it's using a four foot tall quarter 5/8th wavelength antenna instead of the shitty 4-inch antenna on the handheld. Just as well, though, you wouldn't really want the tumors from stuffing that much power through that big of an antenna if you're holding the thing next to your brain when operating.

Another nice thing about the FT-60R is its "smart scan" or "smart search" technology. This allows you to basically set the radio to scan on its own. Typically, when you scan with a radio like my mobile 208h, it works like a car radio and just travels up or down the band and stops at the first frequency in use. That's great, but scanning 144-148 mhz with a ham radio, in 5 khz steps, takes like ten seconds. And you'll get a lot of false hits from data transmissions and repeater self-ID's (every station, even automated ones, has to identify itself every ten minutes while transmitting, hence the "pause for station identification" breaks on broadcast radio) and whatever. Basically, frequency (VFO) scanning is what you don't want to be doing. You want to just find channels (frequencies) in use and store them in your radio's memory. That way, you can then just scan the 10 or whatever stored memory channels (MR scanning vs VFO scanning) rather than the 20000 or whatever possible frequencies on the same band.

But getting scan results into memory channels is a tedious process, and a deeply error-prone and mystifying one, since who knows if that guy you heard on 144.660 was coming out of a local repeater, or operating simplex with a friend, or testing his radio on his own, or coming off an echolink repeater in anothe state. And even if he's using a local repeater, what are the input codes and frequency? You can scan for those as well, once you have the output freq, using a tone scan, but shit that's complicated. So hams usually preprogram their VHF/UHF radios with known repeaters in an area, using a $10 book of all registered national repeaters, or websites with the same info.

(I'm explaining all this because it relates to scanners, which I'll discuss below)

Now, that preprogramming works great if you never travel. But obviously it's useless once you get 40 miles from home and can't even hear your local repeaters, much less hit them with a transmission. At that point, you either have to consult your book again, or scan the slow way. And if you do scan the slow way, now you're checking each 5-khz step through a 4-mhz band only once every ten seconds, assuming your radio hears nothing. So say there's a conversation on 146.880. You scan from 144 up, and when it hits 146.880, eight seconds have gone by and there's a momentary gap in the conversation, which your radio of course interprets as a dead freq, so it keeps scanning up. Now, at best, your next chance to pick up that repeater is on the next scan pass, in another ten seconds, or total 18 seconds from when you started scanning. Oh, but there's a self-ID'ing unused repeater on 146.950, so your radio stops to listen to that for ten seconds flbefore continuing scanning. Finally, if it doesn't stop anywhere else, it comes back to 6.880 a full 28 seconds after you started scanning. By then the conversation there has ended.

This makes it really suck to scan freqs with a ham radio.

But the 60R can sit there for ten minutes scanning on its own and dumping results in temporary memory channels. So you let it analyze the frequency range (you can program up to 20 frequency ranges, such as 144-148 or 146-146.5 or 162-163 or whatever) entirely on its own, until it fills its 30 or so temp channels or you stop it. Then you just scan those 30 or so temp channels. Some will be false returns so you clear them or lock them out. The rest will either be active transmissions, or frequencies which had activity at some point, like a conversation that ended five minutes ago. Those are worth listening to and transmitting on.

Oh, and I suggest modding any ham radio to listen to a wider range of frequencies than it's initially programmed to, and, in emergencies, to transmit out of band on many of those freqs.

BUT, at the end of the day, even that smart search thing is a piss-poor substitute for a real scanner.

Here's how scanners are superior to ham radios, even though most ham radios "can scan":

1. Scanners usually have much wider receive coverage. Even a *modded* 60R ham radio can only hear 138 mhz to 172 mhz or whatever and 430 mhz to 480 mhz or whatever. You can compare that to the Pro-106 scanner's specs which should show it can receive a shitload of frequencies from like 20 mhz up through probably 800 or 900, with very few gaps. And many of the gaps can be worked around with software tricks. So you're opening up all the public safety and transportation and government and snowplow and railroad and aviation and militay bands and all sorts of useful stuff.

2. Scanners handle more modes than many ham radios. I don't know if the 60R can receive AM transmissions from, for instance, the aviation band in 118 mhz or so to 136 mhz or so. It certainly can't transmit on them since it only transmits in FM, although of course the Pro-106, being a scanner, can't transmit on anything at all. BUT, even if the 60R can receive AM, it can't decode digital FM signals like many police departments use. Digital doesn't becessarily mean encrypted; in fact, it usually doesn't. But Rochester PD here transmits in unencrypted digital most of the time, and the Pro-106 reads that clear as day, while the 60R, even if it could hear the freq, which is probably out of its limited RX coverage, would only hear random digital noise, not processed voice audio. HUGE difference. Even a non-digital scanner can't hear those transmissions, but the Pro-106 not only hears them but determines the mode automatically. I just plug in the freq number or scan to it, and the 106 automatically realizes that it's digital audio from a such-and-such system and renders it decoded as normal audio. Simple.

Again, that doesn't help with encryption, encrypted transmissions are still random noise. But it opens up non-encrypted digital transmissions.

3. Scanners are designed to organize frequencies. This is weird until you try it, but imagine that you've stored local fire, local police, and local snowplows all in group one. You've stored ALL nearby police departments, including yours, in group two. ALL fire in group three. ALL snowplows in group four. And the local airport, including its fire and sheriff's details, in group six.

You hear a police car siren go by on the street outside and turn on your scanner to see what's up. Your local PD uses three frequencies and the car may have been a sheriff's deputy, they use another freq in your area. So you want to scan those freqs. But you don't want to be stopping on a conversation between snowplow drivers, and thus missing the vital "responding to a 211 on 123 yourstreet avenue" call on the local police freq. So you turn off the snowplow group and the other groups, and just leave group one set for scanning. To turn aviation back on so that's scanned along with the local group, you simply hit its group number, 6 or whatever, and now your LCD display looks like: 1––––6––- showing the active groups, and it's scanning both and stopping on traffic. Awesome. And you program all this yourself, you decide exactly what frequencies to store, and in what groups to store them. The 106 goes beyond that to let you store frequency scans (such as 144-148 mhz) as independent channels. So you could have it scanning, in sequence, 443.65 mhz, 873.1 mhz, then everything between 144 and 145.2, then repeating the series. VERY powerful capability, it's extremely difficult to find and follow important transmissions without a scanner's organizational capabilities.

4. Scanners can usually follow trunking transmissions. Trunking is a way for organizations like a PD to assign, say, fifteen identifying groups to only five frequencies. This is like cloud servers; you know you have a lot of users with a lot of different tasks, but they don't all talk simultaneously, so you pretend that they have as many frequencies as they need, but you have computers cram those fake groups into just a few actual frequencies.

So if RPD West (RPD doesn't use trunking, this is hypothetical) starts a conversation, they get assigned 853.4 mhz. RPD East puts a call in at the same time, so they get assigned 853.6 instead. Both conversations end. Now RPD East starts a new conversation and gets assigned 853.4. Then RPD North starts a conversation and gets assigned 853.6.

At this point, three separate precincts have engaged in their own exclusive conversations. RPD East never heard West's or North's since they don't want to, and the other groups were the same way. As far as they could tell, they were using exclusive independent frequencies for their own transmissions.

BUT only two frequencies were actually used by those three groups; 853.4 and 853.6.

So if you're in the West region and you have an FT-60R, you're fucked. The 60R can't receive 853.4 mhz at all, it only goes up to 445 or something. B ut say it could. Then you're still fucked, because it can't pick up digital transmissions, and these are. But say it could do that too. You're STILL fucked, because it can't understand trunking. So, sure, you program in 853.4 and 853.6. And there's a hostage situation in RPD East that you want to listen to. But instead you keep stopping on an RPD West conversation about how to properly fill out a doughnut requisition form. And you can't lock out that idiotic conversation because it's not tied to a frequency!

5. Scanners simply scan faster. Much faster. They're optimized for this, whereas ham radios use much of their internal space for the parts required to transmit. That slow-ass ten second scan of the 144-148 mhz band on the 60R might take a tenth that time on the 106.

SO

That's your master class on scanners vs ham radios and what to buy.

Now, don't run out and buy a Pro-106 or an FT-60R or an IC-208h. Do your research, look on radioreference and see what your local area is like. Are their ham repeaters nearby or would crossband repeat or HF be more appropriate? Is there a repeater on your block which would make a handheld radio more useful? Does the local PD use digital radios or analog? Do they use trunking or not? A non-digital non-trunking scanner is like $80, a trunking and digital scanner (like my 106) is $250 when it's on a Black Friday sale, more often it's $350 to $500?

One last note is that some states (like mine) prohibit the use or accessibility of scanners in vehicles. It's considered a burglary tool or something. At home? Great. In a park? Probably okay. In your car's cupholder? Illegal. Even with a ham license.

So, do your research, and ask lots of questions.

Damn JB +1 to you.

THIS^^ ^ Holy shit! Even my dumbass leaned a little something from that! Thank for the write-up!

JBlitzen ThankYou I will do further research.

Best regards Ron

Can someone chime in the public safety changes for next year?

Narrow band? P25? I asked my gf about (dispatcher) she said she fully didn't understand what they are doing.

Talked to a operator done the road (Freind form Church) There is a repeator with in 6-7 miles. He says is strong, in our location.

Best Regards Ron

In this day and age, if you want to listen to public safety, you'd be a fool to not get a P25 compatible (aka digital trunking) scanner. The feds are tossing huge grants at public safety agencies to switch over to P25 systems, so all but the smallest and most rural will probably be digital within 10 years.

I personally would not wast the money on a digital scanner since many of the PD and FD are going to encryption, at that point the expensive scanner is worthless for public safety frequencies. But that is just me.

Some agencies are, but most aren't. Encryption tends to be problematic, gets in the way of inter agency communications (one of the big selling points the Feds are using for P25) , and cuts down on the range. Most of the time officers just use their cell phones for anything really sensitive.

Making it quick here...


P25 and narrowbanding are completely different.


Narrowbanding basically takes the road you drive on and takes the lanes that are 20 feet wide and makes then 10 feet wide. Same size of road, twice as many "lanes" for traffic.


Narrowbanding is switching Part 90 users to use less bandwidth. You'll see the 25khz channel spacing go away and be replaced with 12.5. All Part 90 radios built in the last 10 years (or more) can already do it so there is no need to switch radios, just get the licence upgrade (which does not need to be for a new frequency) and reprogram the radios & repeaters. An EMS agency where I lived in NC went Narrowband early, had to add extra remote receivers to get the coverage they used to have and the comms guy said he wished they had waited until they HAD to switch. An easy way to notice is the volume of a narrowband signal will sound quieter on a wideband receiver. Some scanners and ham rigs can be programmed per channel as FM and NFM. You can switch back and forth and hear the difference.


Some radio salespeople are conning groups into buying digital saying it is mandatory, but right now, it is not. TX will require digital comms (might be P25 Phase 1 by then) on interoperability channels by sometime in 2015 (I think) but if they ain't footing the bill, I say screw them. Besides, interoperability does not mean every person in a 200 person dept has to have a compatible radio, just the ones who will actually be talking to someone else (likely ranking persons on duty) so that cuts the amount of gear to buy.


Someone will correct something I messed up, but for now it's a start (plus I'm not fully awake and need to get ready for work).

As a user of Public Safety comms in one of the fastest growing counties in the country for a few years now, the whole digital thing widely varies... We personally are migrating from UHF to VHF non digital, non trunked system. Two large neighboring agencies are using the Harris Open Sky system and everyone I have talked to thus far absolutely hate it. The best thing I could suggest for listening to public safety stuff, is to see what your surrounding agencies utilize, and then see if you can contact members of those agencies and find out if they are planning any changes to trunked, digital, or encrypted systems before you purchase any scanners. Personally I use a BCT15 for various scanning and I usually have my IC-7000 spinning around various frequencies during the day.

This is not a tag for later reading.

Copyright © 1996 - 2013 :: AR15.Com LLC :: All Rights Reserved.
Any use of this content without express written consent is prohibited.