Police Scanners, Worth It?

For years now, my family has wondered if we should get a police scanner to stay updated on disasters when local news fails to keep us informed.

Because that's happening more and more...

This week I finally dug into it, with mixed results.

On the one hand, we learned the most effective and affordable option is an SDR adapter, a USB dongle that can turn your computer into a radio receiver. We got an RTL-SDR and followed the instructions from this company.

We also downloaded and installed this software to listen to trunked frequencies. Then we watched this guy explain how to import our local emergency frequencies and start listening. For us, it required a small but irritating subscription to RadioReference.com, a communications organization that maintains databases of radio frequencies by county all over the country. You know, it's not that much to pay for such important information. There might be a way to do it manually. For beginners, we just coughed up the money so we could find out how it all worked.

So, we went through all these steps and then learned that most of the emergency departments in our area operate on encrypted networks.

You can't listen to them.

Spending some time on Reddit explained why. It's to protect patients and workers. Apparently, there's a lot of bad faith actors out there who would use this information to do harm. Of course, some of the emergency workers who defended encryption said they've "never heard a good case" for making any of this data public.

Apparently, we're not the only ones running into problems here. Several preppers and radio hobbyists have noted that digital, trunked, and encrypted networks are making it harder to know what's going on around them.

A Uniden police scanner can run anywhere from $150 to $500 and up. An SDR radio kit costs $40, and a RadioReference subscription costs $15. Even with most emergency channels encrypted, we can still pick up a few things.

Even the nicest, most expensive scanners we looked into don't cover encrypted frequencies or even 800 Mhz band, which is what more and more emergency responders are using. So for us, it doesn't make a lot of since to shell out a lot of money for a scanner that probably won't pick up that much. That's just our take.

For the money, nothing beats a simple handcrank weather radio. At least as long as the NOAA continues to exist in some form, it's worth having one.

Anyway, you can follow these steps and see what you can pick up. During an emergency, any information might be better than none.