I recently purchased a new police scanner. (I say "police scanner" because most people think of (flat-bed) image scanners when I just say "scanner"… I guess I could say "scanning multi-band radio receiver"… anyway.) I had it delivered to the place where I work so I wouldn't have to stay home to sign for it or go pick it up at the shipping company when nobody was at my house to sign for it.
I explained to everyone before the package arrived that it was "a toy" and nothing business related. Of course, everyone asked what toy it was. I was surprised by how many of the geeks here at this high-tech company barely understood what a police scanner was, let alone why I would want one.
By way of explaining the fun of scanning and radio-hobbies in general, I offer part of my story.
Awe
When I was 15 (maybe I had just turned 16) my friend Kris's dad, Bob, managed the local office of Pac*Tel paging. They were moving offices and he had enlisted Kris and me to move some back-up batteries for the big "paging terminal". Kris and I had recently watched Weird Al's movie: UHF.
We were talking about how much fun it would be to run our own UHF TV station. Bob overheard us and mentioned that they broadcast UHF there at the pager company. I don't know how Kris felt but I was astonished. Bob then punched up their frequency on a scanner in the engineer's office. Bee-oww wooooooooong brchzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzh shshsh chachachachack… He explained that the paging signal was basically data modulating an FM signal that the pager decoded. At that moment I learned that RF was RF. AM, FM, TV, two-way radios, pagers…
Scanner
After I got my first job selling pagers for this same outfit at the mall, I saved up the dough for a hand-held scanner from Radio Shack. After a few days of searching around and wondering what all these frequencies were I bought Police Call. This had information on FCC radio licenses in my area. I'd look up an agency in the book and program all of the frequencies listed in the guide for that agency. Then I'd scan around these frequencies to see what I could hear.
At least one evening I remember logging everything I heard. Scanner channel, frequency, and what was said. I quickly learned how to recognize dispatch channels, request channels, car-to-car channels etc. I noticed that the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office had more than one channel that sounded like a dispatch channel. It turns out that the valley was divided into geographic areas and each had its own dispatch channel.
Given enough time my buddies and I could have figured out which channel was which area of the valley, but some intelligence was obtained (somehow) that described which channel was for which area. Combine that with some of the other geographically-defined agencies around the valley and we could tune in "areas" instead of just listening to… whatever.
If I was headed to work at, say, Valley Fair Mall I'd tune in the Sheriff's Office West Patrol, West Jordan PD, Salt Lake Community College, Valley Fair Mall. I'd listen to these agencies before I left the house and on the drive over. By the time I got there I already knew that the two police cars across the street from the mall was just one cop on a traffic stop and another one driving by offered assistance.
Which I think is cool.
Maybe next time I'll tell you about how this led to my exciting adventures in Ham Radio.
