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.

Most radio shack scanners are made by a company called GRE with a few being rebadged unidens.
Some radio shacks will program a scanner for you, mine did but the frequencies they loaded were all useless so I cleared it out and started over myself.
Be careful about letting the scanner re-charge the batteries, most are a simple dumb charger which is simply a trickly charge circuit at a slow enough rate to charge most any type of battery safely but doesn't give the best life. I liked the pro 97 because I could pop out the little battery holders so I could charge one set in a good charger while the running the scanner from another set.
Analog and digital when referring to scanners has to do with the type of trunk systems it can decode, not the type of tuning. All are digitally tuned. You want to look at a dateabse like radio reference and determine if you can do with a plain old non trunked or need analog trunked or digital trunked. If you do go with a radio shack then wait for them to go on sale (watch the RR forum, someone will announce it), for example my $199 pro97 went on sale for $149.

Your local Radio Shack should have at least one employee there who can tell you what type of scanner you need, and whether they use analog/digital/trunked/whatever. Probably the manager of the store is the best guy to talk to.

If you can get by with analog, I recommend something like the following:

http://www.yaesu.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCatID=103&encProdID=rHqQH%2FVccfo%3D&DivisionID=65&isArchived=0
http://www.icomamerica.com/products/receivers/r5/default.asp

They will be a bit more expensive than a plain analog scanner. They also might not scan as fast. But they are a LOT more useful, as they also pickup shortwave, am/fm broadcast, television audio, etc.

** EDIT **
A lot of places have laws against using (or even having scanners) mobile. Specifically, I have heard of states in the southeast that confiscate any scanners in a car -- even if handheld and in luggage for use by race fans hoping to hear their favorite driver talking. However, AFAIK, all states have exceptions for amateur radio operators. So, if you study and get your ham license (cheap), then you can legally own a scanner even in a car.

KY and NY are two states I recall that don't allow scanner use.

Really? Even in luggage?

I'm joking, of course, but if I buy one of these confiscated scanners at a police auction in the southeast, how do I get it home?

Threads on radio reference confirm that. The KY police are supposed to take it and run over it with their car. My SIL lives in that state so I have to leave some gear behind when we go there, thankfully we don't often since they still allow people to poison others with nicotine in public.

The Ham Ticket - that's important to have for a Scanner owner. It's the main reason I got a ham ticket in the first place.

http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/scanner5.html

I don't know about the analog or trunking...it's geek to me. But I will say stay away from any radio shack product that has a rechargeable battery. I Had a really nice Pro something while in college. Really fun listening to those cordless telephone calls back in the day...anyway..fast forward a few years and you can't get a replacement battery. Just my advice. Same problem with Craftsman cordless drills.