Our county is not likely to ever go to any kind of trunked system as it is too vast and too remote. Monitoring the sheriff's dept is also important, due to the rising crime rate and the fact it can take 40 minutes after a 911 call to get a cop on the scene.Īgain, in the car and truck I monitor public safety, and for the same reasons given above. And with fast-moving grass fires, that is WAY too late! Monitoring fire services in the county is critical. There is no other way, none, to learn of a fire in the area until I smell the smoke. I do keep 146.52 as the only ham channel in it.īeing in an extremely rural county, a scanner to monitor police and fire is almost necessary. I actually have only ten or so channels plugged into it, and some of them are locked out. I run an old RS 200 channel scanner 24-7. Thanks for the article and the URL's/frequencies! There are no plans to change it, as it works fine and the cost is prohibitive grants or not.īesides weather and railroad monitoring, like many of the other readers I have found that leaving a scanner on the 30 - 50 MHz band detects some great openings. Where I'm at, Austin has gone digital (still doing some VHF analog simulcast), but the local and county stuff (Williamson County) is a Motorola Type II analog trunk system with VHF for the more rural county agencies. Also, there has been some worry over the re-banding using narrower channel seperation for public service/RR/ect. While some of the responses have questioned how fast digital systems will be coming on-line, I think we have some time before a total digital "take over". Two are analog trunk tracking units, but the rest are good old simplex analog. ![]() ![]() I have 7 scanners right now (not including the old Regency gathering dust). Which means that "to the extent that you are using some type of app that is interpreted as obstructing justice, you could be at risk in any state, even in a state with no particular legislation.Nice article. Until then, unwritten laws on obstruction of justice could apply, and that could be bad news for developers and customers alike, because "that is a general common law that doesn't have to be written down in any legislation," Wright said. Another court in another state will rule it does." "In one state if you make it to a court, the court will rule it doesn't violate this law. "The outcome can often be a checkerboard, with very similar laws from one state to the next but different outcomes," he said. "The technology is Buck Rogers stuff that nobody had heard of or thought of at the time the law was written," Wright told me. "This is the latest example of old laws bumping against new technologies where the application of the law is not clear." You don't need to be in radio range, or even in the same state, for them to work. Instead, they receive feeds from police, fire and EMS channels all over the country, streamed over the Internet - and over your cellular network - to your device. The apps don't even turn your phone into a true scanner. The problem, police and legal experts say, is that if you have it with you - in other words, if it's a mobile police scanner - then you can use it the way Matthew Hale is accused of: to aid in the commission of some other crime.Īt least five states - Indiana among them, along with Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota and New York - make it illegal to use a mobile police scanner without a license from the Federal Communications Commission (i.e., a ham license) or permission from local law enforcement. Where things get sticky is when you take it out of your home. It is legal to own a police scanner radio on that, pretty much everyone agrees. (An earlier version of this post misspelled Benjamin Wright's name.) ![]() "As you look across the United States, we have 50 different states, and every state has different laws on things like obstruction of justice," said Benjamin Wright, a legal scholar in data security and forensics technology at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., which teaches law enforcement and other security personnel the ins and outs of technology. Should you scrub that scanner app from your phone? It depends. The law, it turns out, is quite literally all over the map on whether it's legal to use scanner apps on smartphones.
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