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!