Police Scanners

This is what started it all.

Well actually, not this particular model... but it was because of a police scanner that I got into forensic science.

When we had first moved to San Diego back in the mid-1980's, I decided to buy a police scanner just because I thought it would be cool to listen in on what was happening in San Diego. Afterall, you get first-hand news this way!

We had visited my uncle who lived in the Northern California area just before driving down to San Diego since we were passing by on our way. Well, he's a retired Navy guy and he had his police scanner tuned in to listen to all the activity there. Perhaps he was a little more fanatical about it than I was, but it still registered with me that this was a cool way to find out what was happening in your neighborhood.

Anyway, the scanner purchase was around November / December timeframe and just around January, I ended up signing up for school to learn to be an evidence technician. My wife had suggested I look into this because I was so interested in all the activity. She had found an ad in the paper for an evidence technician position with the San Diego Police Department. After a call to the PD, I found I needed to go back to school to get a degree in this. Well, the rest is history.

This particular scanner was one I recently bought on eBay. It seems I've turned into an eBay addict with all the purchases I've made during the past couple of months. My old scanner could only SCAN frequencies that were programmed into the unit. It did not have the ability to SEARCH for new frequencies. Because of this, I was missing a lot. Plus you could only program 10 frequencies into it, so that's all you could listen to.

This new one allows me to program 1000 channels and it covers a lot more frequency ranges as well. Plus you can search for new frequencies too. It's a "trunking" model which is what a lot of police agencies use to transmit quicker. Trunking allows you to use a series of frequencies to transmit rather than waiting for a single frequency to "free up" before you can talk. Much better method for emergency use. But to hear all the action, you need a scanner that can work with this technology. I also upgraded the standard antenna to an 800MHz antenna. This new antenna brings in signals almost twice as strong as the standard antenna.

It was time for me to upgrade after all these years. Scanner technology has definitely improved since my old 1980's unit! Even though my scanner was used and sold on eBay, this scanner model is still currently being sold at Radio Shack, but the manual dates back to 1999... so apparently not much has changed since the late 90's. I got mine at almost half the price of a new unit.

As for photography of this unit, I did the same technique that I used with the Marantz receiver from the last post... "dragging the shutter." The same settings were used on this shot... flash photo with the lens set for f 8 and the shutter dragged at 1 second so that the light from the display would register on the camera sensor. Works great!

The flash was modified with a Gary Fong Lightsphere II with the top dome on. This device diffuses the light so that shadows are reduced. I lowered the angle of the view by placing the camera on a tripod that was set really low. The tripod is necessary to eliminate camera shake when shooting at such a long shutter speed like 1 second.