*skksh* Where do you want to go for lunch?
I’ve been thinking about getting a radio scanner for a while, largely because I want to listen to other paramedics’ call-ins to the hospital. [And also so I can eavesdrop on the supervisor-only channel.] My dad’s birthday is this week, so I decided to buy him a scanner as a gift as he has always been the type to stick his head outside whenever cop cars or ambulances fly by.
I wasn’t about to buy any damn radio scanner without researching it first, so I hung around IRC for a while and did some research on Wikipedia. IT’S SO COMPLICATED.
I was under the impression that a scanner just searched around on frequencies until it heard something. Sure, the old ones do that, but everybody uses Trunking radio systems now. Trunking systems are horribly complicated things that take multiple radio transmissions and spreads them across a bunch of frequencies. Ok, that sounded simple, but here’s what confuses things: it takes multiple transmissions intended for multiple channels and spreads them across multiple shared frequencies. So one frequency won’t contain one conversation, it’ll contain bits and pieces of various conversations–the system keeps track of what bits go with what pieces and the radios receive the completed conversation on the other side.
This is all well and good until you, as a fleshy creature and not a computer, have to find all the assorted frequencies and then make sense of who is saying what where. It only further complicates things when you have different types of trunking systems — that nonsense I don’t even understand but have managed to get things to work regardless.
SO! I bought a PRO-528 handheld radio scanner from RadioShack with the full intentions of programming it, listening to it for a few hours, and then giving it to my Dad as a birthday present. Unfortunately I have a horrid sensation that it’s just going to become an expensive paperweight to due it’s complicated nature. Perhaps this is thanks to the 88-paged manual that is by no means written for the layman. Or the tendency for trunked frequencies to squelch at you when non-audio channel data is being sent on that frequency.
And then, depending on what sort of a system you’re listening to, there can be talkgroups. Talkgroups are what you discover at the end of digging through all the noise — they’re basically channel-tags for the data you want grouped together. Hmm, I don’t think that helped. A talkgroup is the channel you want to hear after all those bits and pieces have been split up and spread across the various frequencies. In the end, if the system is trunked, you’re listening to talkgroups instead of a specific frequency.
I apologize for the mind-streamed manner in which this was written, but that’s how things work when I’m trying to figure crap out.
I am Judy's Amygdala 