POLICE SCANNER APP for Android and iPhone!

Dude you're 2 years late..

 

Just remember, if the stream stops streaming, you are out of luck. And, if the department that is being streamed goes and changes modes which the streaming scanner doesn't have, you are out of luck. And if the department being streamed encrypts, we are all out of luck. I have no truck with these apps or streaming but..... I much better enjoy using my own equipment to listen in. One catches more.

You mentioned LA. There is tons of stuff there to monitor so if you're depending on a single stream, you're missing stuff. My LA county quick-key on the 996XT contains LA police and fire, LA county sheriff and fire, CHP inland division and southern div and several city and county trunked systems. Also know that several municipalities in LACO have thier own police and fire as well. The point here is to show you what you are missing or might not be aware of. Mobile scanners are NOT illegal in California so if you are truly fascinated with what you are monitoring via the app, take the next step and jump headfirst into the scanning hobby- the water is fine!

Note- GRECOM who make their own and Radio Shack branded scanners is not making anymore. Their factory was located in China and apparently China took over the factory and kicked GRECOM out. Uniden is it now and for the foreseeable future.

One other item, using a scanner streaming app in those states where mobile scanning is illegal is considered the same as using a mobile scanner in those states. For information on this, please go to http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/

For more information on monitoring California, streaming, and the radio scanning hobby in general please check out http://www.radioreference.com/

 

I am 47. I have been involved in the hobby and all the twists and turns not to forget technology changes since the early 70s when I had crystal radio sets and my Dad's GE multi band vhf/UHF and HF manually tuned radio. Man those were the good old days to be sure. One department, one frequency. These days we are looking at huge multi frequency systems that are digital and trucked so in turn, scanners have become highly technical and highly complex to meet the challenges of the scanning environment. It's a great hobby and dovetails nicely with my being a ham radio operator as well.

As far as you "programming" the app. It doesn't work that way. Someone somewhere has to hook up a scanner to the Internet and stream what you want to listen to in order to be on that or any other of the scanner apps. Your phone, while a radio transceiver in it's own right is not a scanner or what we define a scanner as. Streamers usually concentrate on their locales and on what interests them or other reasons so for that reason, streamed comms cover only a tiny fraction of the whole available picture. You cannot pick up your local police and fire because no one is streaming those departments. streaming has it's niche in the hobby but it is a narrow niche in my mind- a true hobbyist would not limit himself to such narrow bandwidth in my mind. Not with everything else that is out there.

Mark

Mark

 

I'll give some basic answers here since you asked.

Shortwave

Shortwave is the portion of spectrum that lies between the US AM broadcast band and 30MHz so about 1800KHz(1.8MHz) to 30MHz. It encompasses the CB band (26-28MHz), all the ham medium frequency and high frequency bands, Shortwave broadcasting and utility bands. It is a very large chunk of spectrum.

Two way Radio

Okay. To begin with the term radio is overused in my opinion since it can be applied to a large smattering of equipment. So basically, all two way radios are really transceivers-transmitter and receiver rolled into one device. This obviously includes CBs, public safety, mobile, handheld, even your cell phone is a two way radio device. If you talk on it and listen to it at the same time and it uses the radio spectrum, it's a two way radio. Let's see yep, covers 100% of transceivers out there.

Scanners

A scanner is a radio receiver that monitors a group of frequencies one at a time in sequence very rapidly. It stops when it detects activity on a frequency as it passes over it. This is called a hit. Scanners are typically programmed to dwell or stay on an active frequency for a period of time after during and after a hit though after, it's called delay time. With most scanners these are user programmable and can allow the user to set when the scanner moves along after a hit. Typically these are factory set at two seconds to allow the user to copy any further traffic on the frequency being monitored before moving on. But again, users will have thier own preferences. The user can also "lock out" programmed frequencies for a variety of reason or, "hold" pause scanning.

Today's radio environment is very complicated and becoming even more so. The days of one department or one beat per freq are disappearing and being replaced by extremely complicated digital trunked systems made up of hundreds of frequencies and carrying literally hundreds of users at the same time. This has forced today's upper end scanners to be very complex sophisticated devices more designed to be programmed with software designed for particular scanners. In an environment like Denver for instance, it would hundreds of hours to program in everything that is that area by hand( With software and a premium membership to Radioreference.com, takes me about two hours. Then I can save the file for the next time) Now, if you happen to live in a rural area for example, then you don't need a really overly sophisticated scanner but, if you travel or as in my case, truck, you have to have one. Or, get one of the preprogrammed units like the Uniden Home Patrol in order to be able to monitor everything you want to monitor(assuming no encryption). Again, Radioreference.com is the place to go for information on this or thier sponsor, Scannermaster. com. There is no way I can go any deeper into this here because of the nature of beast, the scanning environment which is very rich with content but can be a challenge to program. My primary equipment for this is the Uniden996XT and I use Butel's XT Pro software to program it. I personally like programmable scanners over these preprogrammed ones like the Home Patrol for the simple fact I consider myself a purist. I love programming in a system the way I want to pure and simple.

Anyhow, I hope I answered your questions.

Mark