Does anyone have thoughts on a good but NOT expensive hand held police scanner? Around $100 would be good! This would be used to listen to police, fire and ambulance traffic to get a sense of what is going on during a local emergency. I have a small multi-band radio but it is a pain to dial in the correct frequency and there are several frequencies used in my local area.

Thanks!

I don't have any tips as far as brands go, but make sure which ever one you get will also recieve weather stations. In some states it's illegal to have a radio that only scans police and fire freq's.

Also note a lot of places have gone to digital trunking systems. Scanners that do digital trunking are not cheap, but in these places analog scanners are going to be less effective.

-john

Look at RadioShack's PRO-528.

Radioshack Scanners

It is made by Uniden (as most scanners are) and does a good job, even better if you buy a better than stock antenna. I got mine during one of their sales for just a shade over $100. It has 1000 programable channels, does weather band and reads trunking channels as well.

You can buy an adapter and program with a couple different software packages, or just go with the stuff that Radioshack will download for you when you buy it, which should be pretty good for your local area. Has settings for use with rechargable batteries.

A very good value for the money.

Greg

I live near one of the Army's chemical weapons disposal sites, and the federal EMA replaced ALL local law enforcement and emergency response agency radio systems with a central trunked and encrypted system. No scanner will receive and decrypt those signals. It is important to find out what kind of system your local agencies operate and if a scanner is going to be able to receive their transmissions.

Oh yes, and thanks to all you good taxpayers for helping pay for this $30-million federal boondoggle radio system.

Oh, if you only knew the extent of it.

Currently radio shack has scanners in the $79 range on closeout.

Bear in mind that these are Analog systems, and they only offer minimal "Trunk Tracking" and no digital capabilities at all.

Check www.radioreference.com for information about the systems used in your area. If you are on a "Conventional" system or even a "Trunked" system, these "Trunk Trackers" from Radioshack will do fine. If you're on a system such as a "Motorola Astro" you will be out of luck, as the cheapest digital scanners made are $500 or so.

You can find the frequencies for your local area on the Radio Reference database:
http://www.radioreference.com

Use of the database is free and the information is generally updated frequently.

Use this to decide if you need a fancy digital scanner or whether a less expensive analog-only model will do the job.

Here in Colorado, the State and many of the cities and counties have gone to the trunked digital system so that pretty much dictates an expensive scanner. Depends on what you want to listen to whether there is a problem or not.

There is also a thing called "rebanding" going on where many existing systems are being changed in their frequencies. In many cases these new frequencies can't be recieved by current model scanners. (700 Mhz area) Colorado is in transition.

"... Radioshack will download for you when you buy it..."

They do that? Boy did we get screwed when we got mine (actually, Santa brought it, but you know what I mean)...

Just a friendly word of advice, if at all possible do not buy an analog scanner. Unless you only want to listen to a few known frequencies get a digital one with auto scanning function. It's the only way to explore lots of bandwidth efficiently. Manually tuning an analog scanner is just too slow.