(Anyone else here who is an emergency responder, jump in)

Be careful when you use a scanner to get information about emergencies. Not because of the legalities of it (check local laws, especially for mobile use) but because over the air (OTA) communications are increasingly a small part of the overall information flow, and OTA communications are still highly fragmented in most jurisdictions - EMS and Fire and Police and Roads Department and everyone else operate on different bands, with different radios and so on. At the dispatch center, they have an array of communications gear that lets them hear and speak with multiple agencies, unless you're ready to drop a lot of money on a lot of scanning gear, you'll never actually get the big picture.

Then there is the matter of how what seems important on the scanner is masking what's important to people not in the area of the emergency.

If you were listening to a scanner when the bomb scare happened in NYC a few weeks ago, you would not have heard a thing of importance about anything other than the immediate closure zone - and there was much other stuff going on that day, in particular incredible traffic at the tunnels.

Just remember that scanners are handy - but not at all the "big picture" information that you need.

Depends upon the complexity of the environment.
NYC and LA are probably the most complex scanner environments around so they'd be difficult to deal with. Some cities have encrypted so they are right out.

Other areas are nowhere near that complicated. Colorado is pretty advanced in terms of using digital trunked systems but this doesn't make it impossible to understand the situation.

2 of the 3 counties, the city, and the state agencies I listen for on my daily commute are on digital and are (so far) straightforward to listen to.

1 county and 1 city I listen to are still on VHF analog systems and even easier to listen to.

Even as a longtime scanner fan and power-user I'd probably not attempt to try to listen to NYC unless I moved there. And then I wouldn't expect easy success.

I think Wyoming still uses smoke signals in some areas :-)

I think even the NSA has trouble figuring out what's being said in radio traffic in NYC and LA.

Orange County, California is one of those areas so that's a large, densely populated metropolitan area that is pretty inaccessible for scanners. I had been thinking of getting into scanning when I first moved here but then I learned that we have a countywide digital, trunked, encrypted (at least all the LE traffic) comm system, so scanning is mostly useless here.

Orange County Fire Authority and the various wildland firefighting groups, like US Forest Service and CalFire, probably are not encrypted yet or on this countywide system so scanning might be useful during wildfires. But around here, there is so much realtime news coverage from the ground and air of wildfires (and high speed car chases) that you don't even need a scanner to know what's going on with your own eyes!

The MVT (Motor Vehicle Terminal) is an increasingly important form of emergency communications, regardless of what the voice network is doing. When I was an officer in the fire company, we also had direct-to-dispatch phone numbers where we could bypass the radios entirely. For really important stuff (like, "tell the coroner the guy is dead already") we would never go over the air. We also used text messages quite a bit for dispatch details.

And, of course, as comms go digital, they get much harder to deal with and the costs go way, way up.

How messed up is NYC Emergency radio traffic? Let's see.

First of all, the radio systems used by FDNY and NYPD are 100% incompatible.
Secondly they use obsolete and absurd 10-codes. Not the same 10 codes for cops and fire - no of course not! There's separate 10-codes that overlap sometimes but not often.
Oh, and Transit uses "12" codes!
There are two separate police agencies at Penn station - NYPD Transit Division and Amtrak, they are on separate radio systems and Amtrak and NYPD don't share codes. Then there's the 800 Mhz trunked city system, used sometimes by some emergency responders in some situations. Oh, did I mention that EMS - part of the fire department- runs separate radio systems too? (with 1.2 Million calls a year, I guess they need it).

It goes on and on and on...LA is much easier, but still complex to scan.

Our local agencies page info they don't want to air such as combinations, where to find the door key and so forth.

NYC wasn't anyplace I was going to visit anyway.....

Isn't NYC one of the scanners are illegal places. KY is another, one more reason to never visit the SIL.

Get a ham license, bypasses all the scanner laws.

OCFA does have encryped, or at least multiple, channels. I used to work EMS in the OC, and our scanners had them programmed; unfortunately we didn't get all their side channels.

Well, there goes another scanner source in Orange County. Sounds like OCFA finally made the switch, too.

Keep in mind that the authorities in many areas do not want the public at large knowing what is going on, and actively seek technologies such as data terminals and encryption to make it harder and harder for you to get real time information from any source.

Some of this is legit, but most of it is that they just don't want people knowing what is going on except for the official stories that are almost always useless for basing any kind of decisions on, and often times misleading, or downright false.

They even flat out lie on a regular basis to the press, who dutifully report such lies as facts.

As the complexity increases, the utility decreases. I know brain surgeons. They have trouble keeping up with brain surgery. The people who operate and maintain these radio systems are not brain surgeons. Nevertheless, I have digital scanners and use them to keep track of what's going on in the LA area, particularly my neighborhood. I just take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Mostly what you hear are a bunch of meaningless numbers, or messages, or things like "The 'package' is on the way....the 'package' is over Encino.....the 'package' has arrived." They called Michael Jackson's casket the "package" during his memorial services over at The Staples Center. Interestingly, you also heard people saying they weren't allowing Staples employees into the facility that day because no one had arranged for them to have security clearance.

Or, and this is the number one thing you generally hear on the scanner, "You have an open mic!" This is about the only time you actually hear something meaningful, when you hear part of a real-live conversation between the cop and his/her partner cuz his/her mic is open and he/she doesn't know it.

Oh, and in an area like LA, where you'll have hundreds of frequencies loaded on your scanner, even if you do catch something of interest, you'll rarely catch the follow-up messages because the scanner will have moved on to scanning the other frequencies, unless you have a certain frequency (such as for your local cops or fire department) set as a "Priority" channel, in which case then it will go to that channel whenever there's any activity on it, AND you'll then be missing out on any activity of potential interest on other channels programmed into the scanner.

Finally, by far the most interesting thing I've heard on my scanner, besides perhaps a lot of coordinated activity during the Malibu fires several years ago, was a sting operation at some Thai massage parlor in my area, perhaps the one just a few yards from my house. They were trying to pinch people involved in getting/giving special "massages" apparently. By the way, from my roof deck, I have observed that the female Thai masseuses drive by far the nicest cars in my part of town. They all have BMWs, Mercedes, Lexuses, etc etc and park them in front of my house. I guess business is always good.

my military time was with the now defunct USAF Security Service as a radio traffic analyst...and worked both Cold War and SEA targets..so had an interest in scanners when I separated... most interesting was when the Summit Venture smacked into the Skyway Bridge...

as a HS teacher I was on the emergency management committee following the active shooter incident at Colombine, Co and we reevaluated our emergency management plans...portable radios were always in short supply and high demand...if you have kids in school, check with your Parent/Student/Teacher assn, and see what kind of cell phone tree teachers have with the front office during building evacuations...and if teachers can use money allocated for classroom supplies to purchase FRS type radios so they can form a comm net, as an administrator with a radio might be a football field away if needed...(in my case a student had with bad allergies needed some benedryl)

we had a 3hr building evacuation, and as soon as the local TV helicopter did a live shot, our front office and local 911 center was flooded with calls from anxious parents, effectively shutting off our lines of communication

I remember a friend getting concerned about something he heard on his scanner and then finding out that he was listening to the wrong channel for emergency services and was getting one side of a conversation that was scene by scene discussion of an action movie.
For a few minutes it sounded like there was something major going on.

Pretty easy to combine the precautionary principle, a bit of latent paranoia, and some free-floating imagination and get yourself worked into a lather over nothing. Or be reassured that there is nothing to worry about because you don't hear alarm calls on your scanner.

Remember that HGWells announced many times during his radio play "War of the Worlds" that it was fiction but many people thought it was real. Raw broadcasts delivered in fractured form and out of context are devilishly hard to interpret.

Ex-292 here. 6818th Japan. 6924th Danang. Small world. Now it's known as the much sexier Air Intelligence Agency, or was. May have changed or realigned the command again.

xbanker...even smaller world...202 Dawg Flight 6918th (ZK) 71-till closing, Day shop 6922 Clark till end of air war...had orders to OLAA 6924 but red lined to Clark...

My old neighborhood we saw several police cars show up at the house across the street one day, I grabbed my scanner and turned it on and heard another responding to a code 51 (IIRC). So i quickly looked up 'xcity police codes" on the internet and found a code 51 was a stabbing. Later after the police cleared the scene the lady renting the house was escorted back to gather her stuff to leave as her baby daddy had found her and stabbed her in the neck. When police/fire/ems comes down your street its quite handy to get any information a to whats going on, if it would have been a gas leak or somehting like that we would have evacuated, but a stabbing we stay in and lock the doors (and grab the shotgun) as the suspect could have still been in the neighborhood.
We regularly have tornado warnings/watches here and I pull out the scanner and scna though the local news, weather, and skywatch channels to see stay one step ahead of the tv news.

BTW, there is a scanner app for iPhones. There coverage is spotty but might be handy where one lives or where one finds themselves during an emergency.

Les, you have PM.

There is a scanner app for decent phones too, android, blackberry, winmo all have them. It works out well for me as after I moved were in an area where the police/fire/ems are digital trunked so mu $150 analog trunked scanner doesn't help much here. But the calls get routed back to the city which is analog trunked so the scanner app lets me listen to the digital for now.

The scanner app is nice but relies upon Internet connectivity. I wouldn't rely upon it in a large scale emergency.

"How messed up is NYC Emergency radio traffic? Let's see.

First of all, the radio systems used by FDNY and NYPD are 100% incompatible.
Secondly they use obsolete and absurd 10-codes. Not the same 10 codes for cops and fire - no of course not! There's separate 10-codes that overlap sometimes but not often.
Oh, and Transit uses "12" codes!
There are two separate police agencies at Penn station - NYPD Transit Division and Amtrak, they are on separate radio systems and Amtrak and NYPD don't share codes. Then there's the 800 Mhz trunked city system, used sometimes by some emergency responders in some situations. Oh, did I mention that EMS - part of the fire department- runs separate radio systems too? (with 1.2 Million calls a year, I guess they need it).

It goes on and on and on..."

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the attack on the WTC. They haven't learned much, have they? Ego superceding usefulness.

Sue

NYC _IS_ working on a new system - I know a guy who worked for DoITT and still works in comms for "undisclosed" agency (for his privacy) - They have had systems put in that totally failed, and there was some real fun with one of the radio companies (Hint, he has carried the new radios they are testing). I know he personally got his hands on some of the radios they are testing - on his OWN personal dime

They are looking at various brands of radios that go from 50Mhz to the 900Mhz band, all in one radio, that hand conventional, trunking, P25, plain voice, etc

Lots oh fun

I mean, FDNY tried what, 2-3 times to upgrade JUST their own radio system, and it didn't work

FDNY has a real "interesting" way their radios work/worked - the idea was that dispatch was on 4 frequencies (SI and the Bronx shared), and that the "fireground" frequency was common, but the radios were low power, and had very limited range. The idea being that it was rare to be fighting two fires close to one another, and geographic seperation would keep 2 fires from conflicting, but when you rolled up on a fire, you WOULD be on the right frequency. The PROBLEM comes when you get into a highrise fire, and the radio power is low enough that you can't talk out (which is why certain buildings like the WTC have/had a repeater that could be turned on), and also when you get 600-700 firefigters all on one fire, the radio turns to chaos. The OTHER fun was when they tried to go digital - a certain radio company that will remain nameless sold them on "it's always clear, no static" - what they never mention is that with plain old unencrypted analog, when you are borderline, you can still make out say 50% of the transmission, and get some clue/know that there was a tranmission, where with digital, it's 100%, or NOTHING