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Scanner fans know what’s up
Friday, April 6, 2007
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photo by Darwin Weigel
Doug Smith, manager of the Radio Shack store in Dunkirk, holds a digital trunking scanner and VHF radio outside his business.
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Montgomery has a fire-and-police radio scanner — actually three of them. Like many people he now listens in primarily out of recreational curiosity, but he remembers when scanners were an essential tool in his life.
Montgomery, 72, was born a year after the start of the Mechanicsville Volunteer Fire Department, and in his young adulthood he and four other firefighters had two-digit identification names, and a unique way to communicate with each other.
‘‘We started out in the early ’50s with the scanners,” Montgomery said of the receivers with frequency crystals. ‘‘I had one in the car, too. They came out of the old police cars. An electronics person ... switched them out for us.”
They could call each other from the firehouse, with its two-way radio.
‘‘It was easier,” he said, and cheaper than the other option at the firehouse. ‘‘We had a pay phone.”
The frequency crystals may be a thing of the past in an age where scanners now have memory banks of thousands of channels, but Montgomery remembers them well. He had a collection of about 100 of the fingernail-size crystals for his scanners.
‘‘You had to put the crystals in them. They were complicated pieces back in those days,” he said. ‘‘It would take a half an hour to open it up.”
Firefighters with the scanners sometimes could tell when they were needed before their alarm sounded.
‘‘That gave us a little bit of a jump on everything,” Montgomery said. ‘‘The scanners were important to us. Everybody knew everybody. When they needed some help, everybody would be on top of it.”
About three years ago, nature forced Montgomery to upgrade his scanner technology.
‘‘Lightning hit the house and it burned up [the three older scanners] that we had,” he said, along with other property including his central air-conditioning system.
There are now three newer scanners at John and Barbara Montgomery’s home in the northern St. Mary’s community, including a 1,000-channel base unit bracketed to a wall in his garage near a table and chairs. They have two handheld scanners, including one in the kitchen.
‘‘We turn it up loud enough that we can hear it in the bedroom,” John Montgomery said. ‘‘We carry one when we go in the motor home.”
Montgomery stopped running to fire calls for the most part in about 1990, but he’s still a member of the fire department and still monitors the dispatch broadcasts.
‘‘Especially if it’s in our territory,” he said, and he will drive out to where his successors are when necessary. ‘‘It’s just part of my life. If the fire department gets in a jam, I go to it.”
Barbara Montgomery understands her husband’s draw to the sound of the scanner.
‘‘He’s still got it in his blood,” she said, ‘‘and he’ll keep it there forever.”
Radio evolution continues
Scanner technology has improved, but it’s mostly driven by upgrades in the two-way radio systems used by police agencies, fire and rescue volunteers and the emergency dispatchers who tell them where to go.
The newest equipment also attracts people with other interests, including automobile racing fans who can take a ‘‘signal stalker” scanner to a raceway and pick up the frequency being used by nearby drivers and pit crews, according to Doug Smith, store manager of the Radio Shack in Dunkirk.
Smith, who worked as a police dispatcher in California for 12 years and also served as a reserve police officer, said that all three Southern Maryland emergency radio systems now use a complex trunking system, and that Charles County and Washington, D.C., have gone further, to digital technology.
Trunking allows all agencies in a county to use the same radio system, through a central computer system, which allows the agencies to better communicate, including members of the same agency.
‘‘Police officers will always hear the other police officers,” Smith said.
The police, fire and rescue agencies each have their own talk groups in the radio system, but once their members are out on a call, the main computers quickly guide their transmissions to open frequencies. And the channel base changes every 24 hours.
Some agencies still simulcast their transmissions on older low-band frequencies, but listeners with older scanners generally can hear only an initial dispatch of an emergency call. ‘‘They’re missing the ability to track a conversation,” Smith said. ‘‘You need a trunking scanner.”
And scanner listeners in Charles County now need digital scanners. Calvert County could be next.
‘‘It takes the analog audio and changes it into data,” Smith said. ‘‘The officer is transmitting his voice on one frequency, to a repeater, ... [and] the voice is converted to digital. The weak voice can be made strong, and the strong voice can be made easy to understand.”
Without a digital scanner, he said, ‘‘You’ll just hear a loud buzz saw noise.”
The digital systems also allow agencies to exchange encrypted transmissions, which can’t be decoded by scanners.
Smith, who has accepted a moniker of ‘‘Scanner Man” from his customers, said he enjoys listening to Washington’s taxi dispatchers as they coordinate ‘‘an on-the-air ballet,” and the military channels that include the jet pilots ‘‘protecting us overhead every day.
‘‘You get a good appreciation for other people’s occupations,” he said. ‘‘It’s a natural sense of curiosity. You want to know what’s going on in the world.”
The prices for digital scanners hover in the $400 range, but can be cut by $100 during sales, and that can slow down the rush to upgrade for businessmen like Mike Jones, owner of Charles County Auto Body in Indian Head. Like other jurisdictions, Charles County authorities call local tow truck services to accidents on a rotating basis. A tow truck driver’s arrival at a crash scene without an invitation would not be well received, but monitoring the police communications can give the auto body business’ employees a heads up on when they might have a run to make.
‘‘We would listen to it,” Jones said, ‘‘and if we [expected] a call, we would get the driver ready to go.”
The company’s trucks had their own scanners, but they’re now of little use.
‘‘They’re the old frequencies,” Jones said, and his own scanner also became obsolete. ‘‘I had one in my house,” he said, ‘‘and I threw it in the Dumpster.”
Jones eventually might buy new scanners for his business, once the initial rush subsides in the balance of supply and demand.
‘‘When they come down in price, I might consider it. My hard-charging zest is gone,” he said.
The chief tow truck operator of the business already has purchased one of the new scanners, and said it was worth the $500.
‘‘It is to me,” Norman Goode said, ‘‘because I run a lot of police calls. That way, I can hear stuff in advance and know what I’m going to need, ... whether I need a rollback or a wrecker.”
In the shop’s office, an older base unit still drones out the tones preceding another emergency call.
‘‘I get used to it,” a secretary said, and she offered another reason why governments and their agencies keep raising the bar in their radio communication technology. ‘‘They tried to eliminate the bad guys from being one up on the police department,” she said.
E-mail John Wharton at jwharton@somdnews.com.
