Source: Fandom.com
Police scanner! This post is notes to myself on the quick and easy way to get a modern police scanner functioning. It boils down to:
- Ignore the directions.
- Buy the software.
- Buy the data.
Am I really that dumb?
Source: Fandom.com
In my quest to Get Rid of Stuff, I’m now working through a lot of old electronics, including a bunch of different radios. Most of it, I knew what to do with, or the stuff was good enough that I could easily give it away.
And then there was my police scanner. This is a Radio Shack Pro-197 digital trunking scanner.
I bought this years ago — I’m guessing mid-2000s — for reasons that escape me.
All I recall about it is that:
- I paid a lot of money for this, years ago.
- I never could figure out how to get the damned thing to work.
I figured it would be like a short-wave radio. Plug it in, turn it on, turn the dial.
Boy, was that wrong. And welcome to the world of Object Oriented Scanning. Where everything is an object. And nothing makes sense.
Realize that I spent my professional career writing complex computer programs. Yet I couldn’t make head or tail out of Object Oriented Scanning. I won’t go into how absolutely useless the user manual is. Except to note that it’s so awful that somebody took the time to rewrite the entire manual into a more readable form. And even that went over my head.
Moreover, my usual approach of turn it on, push the buttons, see what happens, yielded more-or-less nothing. All the elements appeared to be in place — frequencies, system types, all that jazz needed to define the modern communications object. All that was missing was noises coming out of the speaker.
Nor was I alone in this. You can look at internet chatter and see that many, many people were baffled by the brave new world of Object Oriented Scanning.
In any case, after years of occasionally trying (and failing) to get this to work, I finally cracked the code. So I thought I would share it. All I had to do was:
- Ignore absolutely all the bafflegab about Objects, Trunks, Talkgroups, and so on, in the user manual.
- Realize that all of the frequency (etc.) information that came pre-loaded on the radio was wrong/obsolete.
- Buy the software, hardware, and data access to replace the incorrect frequency information with the correct data.
- Now it works like a charm.
I suspect that a big part of the problem is that I really needed the software and the (hardware) data transfer cable from the get-go. But Radio Shack provided neither of them. It is possible, in theory, to program that information in manually. But it’s a lot easier just to buy and use the right software.
The quick guide
These folks will sell you the PC software, for about $40. They have a one-time free trial, which for Radio Shack radios is at this reference. I believe that’s all Windows only.
If you want to use this more than once — say, take another crack at downloading the information that lets you listen to your local public service providers, or download different types of radio networks — you’ll need to subscribe to the RadioReference database, for about another $20 for six months.
If your radio is like mine, you’ll need a cable to connect your PC’s USB port to the input jack on your radio, which, archaically, uses a headphone jack instead of a USB port. Mine, I bought years ago from Radio Shack. For your radio, you’ll want to look on your manufacturer’s website. Mine was so old it was very old-school in term of manually loading the drivers and all that.
Using the software on the PC, look up the information for your state and county. Say, for trunked systems, which is going to cover most urban police forces. Download it off the RadioReference database. Edit it, if you must.
Then, turn on your radio, plug in the cable, and download all that correct and current information to your radio. Instructions for the radio side of this were nonexistent. That’s because, near as I can tell, when you plug in the cable, with the radio turned on, the radio stands by to download the information. The computer software controls the download.
At the end of which, all that information is in your radio’s active memory.
Then, to be safe, you should save that information to a permanent file in your radio’s memory. For the Radio Shack model, these permanent files are termed V-scanner folders. The radio comes with 21 of them, and you should just think of them like awkward Windows folders. On my radio, you access that via Function – Program. Pick a folder, and save the current memory to that folder.
You’re done.
Hit “scan”, and the radio will scan all the systems that you just downloaded. In my case, every trunked pubic provider system in Fairfax County.
I suppose there’s a software method to limit that search to just a subset, but with 20 more V-folders available, if I want to do that, I’ll just edit the list and load that into another V-folder. If I want to restrict to that subset, I’ll load the contents of that edited list — from the V-folder to active memory — and use that.
Anyway, for the first time since I bought this close to two decades ago, it works as advertised. Nothing wrong with the hardware. Major issues with the input data.
And, I guess, operator ignorance. Funny thing is, I’m still ignorant — I have no clue how this actually works. But now, at least, it does work.
