Comment by jacquesm

8 months ago

It monitored various emergency and other radio channels used by police, fire department, ambulance service, taxis and so on. The '10 channels' is in reference to how many tuned channels the thing can scan.

Here is some more detail for that particular scanner:

https://www.rigpix.com/rs-realistic/realistic_pro57.htm

22 comments

jacquesm

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pfexec  7 months ago

Waiting for someone to explain that iPhone has replaced this too (via streaming), completely unaware that the origin of the stream is likely a 3.5mm jack on... an actual scanner.

  • brewdad  7 months ago

    While very true, so long as someone keeps that scanner online and the source remains unencrypted, only one person needs to own a scanner rather than hundreds.

    Sadly, my city now encrypts all police channels. Fire and EMS can still be streamed though.

  • bluGill  7 months ago

    Likely replaced by group text for most. my grandpa drove snowplow for the state and often had the scanner listening for when he might be called in. he couldn't respond directly but he did call dispatch to give his ability to come in. Pagers probably replaced that for many.

ianburrell  7 months ago

It might be possible to use iPhone as scanner with RTL-SDR dongle. I don't know if there is any scanner software for the iPhone, most of it is PC software.

  • djmips  7 months ago

    Anything is possible with accesories but that breaks the thesis.

    • jacquesm  7 months ago

      For the moment, yes. But in practice, this years dongles are next years built-ins. The same was the case with GPS, accelerometers, temp and humidity sensors, blood oxygen sensors, incident light detection, finger print reading, cameras and so on. Phones absorb sensors like toddlers consume cookies, they can't get enough of them.

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