While poking around for additioal information preps, I discovered there are a lot more RF bands in use then I initially thought. Between REACT, ARRL/ARES, RACES, and the local emergency services, I'm seeing: HF and above ham bands, MURS, CB, FRS/GMRS, and LMR. I'm hoping that listening in on these channels could provide information well before it percolatesw down to the broadcast AM radio emergency stations.

Is there any real advantage to monitoring these, and one better then the others for this?

I looked at, but I'm not interested in ATM, at getting a ham or GMRS licence.

Mark... for me, naturally, the more options you have for receiving timely information, the better you can make a decision on how to react in case of an emergency...as an Air Force Radio Traffic Analyst, my job was to perform analysis of intercepted communication, and issue any tactical condition warnings or critical time restrained intelligence reports to higher echelons ...call sign, frequency, and operating schedule analysis was a necessary part of the job... on a practical aspect, living on the central Gulf Coast of Florida, I follow the Crown Weather Service Tropical reports, I have two SAME weather alert radios for tornado alerts, a portable digital TV with folding dipole rabbit ear antenna for local Doppler radar that is GPS linked, as well as an old Grundig crank radio with which during the 2004 9 day power outage listened to the BBC World Service... I'm not sure the BBC still broadcast on HF...it is my understanding that the LDS net was very effective during Katrina...FEMA frequencies are on the net.. many local VHF emergency nets in my area are encrypted...

I think monitoring first responder channels is the way to go for the earliest warnings in your local area.

Most other stuff comes thru channels that have to be "activated" by the PIO machines of agencies.


When the big floods hit Colorado 2 years ago I heard, in real time during my early morning commute, the fireman who'd gone up a canyon to check on something as he was reporting his situation from up a tree using a handheld radio. Flood waters had come down and started washing his truck away so he climbed a tree.
He carefully gave dispatch his name, agency and home phone number in case he drowned. (!)

From that I had a pretty good idea that there was badness going on in the canyons.

News stations started doing gee-whiz coverage a few hours later.

When it was time to bail out of work and go home, I tried to use the scanner to figure out what routes were open. That idea failed. Every channel was utterly clogged with continuous traffic since the flooding was so widespread across the area I needed to transit to get home.

Only my personal knowledge of multiple back road routes home got me there before some of the bridges washed away.

Enjoy it while you can. The trend in many areas seems to be towards police, fire, and EMS going to encrypted digital communications.

Encryption - yep.
My town has gone there. The next town in my commute has encrypted everything but dispatch.
But the next 2 towns and the 2 counties and the State and the snowplows haven't (yet).

The bulk of the first responders are in the 144-174MHz LMR bands. I have no idea if they are encrypted. I would imagine that LE is, but ARES/RACES isn't. Everything else is a flip of the coin.

The website RadioReference is the place to go to find out frequencies and agencies for just about anywhere in the US.
And there are notes about encryption and sometimes pending system changes.

Most of Colorado first responders are on an 800 Mhz trunked system. Some agencies haven't converted yet and others keep the VHF freqs as backup for areas where the trunked system doesn't have coverage. But the dominant system in Colorado is the 800 Mhz DTRS.

Each area is different so it would pay to investigate one's area closely rather than relying on general internet advice.

ARES/RACES in the ham bands cannot, by regulation, be encrypted.

Nuts. Most of the emergency services have switched to 700 MHz P25 or 800 MHz Motorola trunked bands, but kept the VHF/UHF bands as backups. That means a trunk tracking scanner ($$$). The civilian emergency services (CERT, REACT, ARES/RACES) are all on the 2M or 70cm ham bands with CTCSS tones.

Is there any real value in monitoring those?

Also, does anybody know a quick way to boost FM radio reception? I can pick up AM signals clearly from 80 miles out, but FM is less then half that.

frequency modulated (FM) voice communications on VHF and higher frequencies signals are line of sight as they don't readily bounce off the ionosphere (specialized military transceivers bounce off ionized tails of micro meteors) and "skip" as the lower frequency HF signals do...they travel on into Space... due to the curvature of the Earth you may not be actually inside the cone of coverage of the transmitter's antenna... your receiving antenna must be elevated high enough to do so... the signal strength inside the cone can be increased by a Yagi multi element di-pole antenna, where each of the parallel elements induces a little more signal voltage and is very directional...and there are amplifiers that boost signal...

I don't know your age, but pre cable TV antennas were Yagi... with several distinct lengths of elements pre cut for a particular TV channel frequency (ABC,CBS,NBC)... and a smaller 8 or so element nose for the UHF/VHF networks... an antenna rotor was used to orient them

Not sure if it's used in the states, but where I life the radio's are encrypted, but the pagers are open. If you know how to read the pager messages you should know a lot about the incident and since you can see them on your computer screen you can also see the older messages, giving you a nice overview. You can also search by location and rescue service.

I know a lot of proffesionals grab there computers and have a look there pager messages there, since there are many open websites which will also automatically point the location on google maps. Also opening the link on you browser is quicker dan browsing on the pagers.