I ran across this and bought it. It is a CB radio with a scanner built into it. It is really cool. It has a GPS sensor that figures out where you are then it looks up the frequencies for police, fire department, ems and dot in that area from a memory stick you update from Uniden's website. Uniden says they update the frequency list every 2 weeks.
Anyway, I drive quite a bit and this is interesting...
I also found a website you can listen to your local police if you're into that https://www.broadcastify.com/
Holy Shit I started on a Uniden mobile CB unit and power supply hooked up to a 102 whip out my bedroom window in 1975. Damn this brings back memories.
In this day and age most metropolitan police frequencies are encrypted so law enforcement doesn't have to fear the snooping eyes of the press and public. Scanners are useless now.
Yet another reason I'm thankful I no longer live in a "metropolitan" area.
It would be terrible if somebody were to get some cheap Chinese radios and set them to transmit on those encrypted frequencies and just flew them around the repeater sites on drones. No way to take them out. No way to know who's responsible. And the entire region's law enforcement communications infrastructure is disabled for hours at a time.
I would hate for any terrible criminals to engage in such piracy because I'd like to save that trick for SHTF. No need alerting authorities to the strategy and letting them have time to prepare a defense.
Unless you're in an area that demands special frequencies (mountain regions sometimes use 30MHz still,) most of the state will use the same system. For example, most of the state of Ohio uses a system called MARCS, a trunked, multi-agency comms system.
I like how the scanner can do both analog and digital
I was initially concerned the police in my area might use digital encrypted radio communications but I hear them loud and clear.
I think they only use encryption for a very specific channel. otherwise its just a digitally encoded (but not encrypted) trunked system.
Just don't get caught with it in your car.
Even in municipalities that try to restrict scanners in your car, having an amateur license (carry a copy in the car) will generally override that.
A technician class license is pretty easy to get.
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