On 17 Apr 2004 09:29:12 -0700, (Dave) wrote:

Thanks very much all for your suggestions and information. It's very
useful to learn this! I'm in the SF Bay Area, by the way. Anyone know
if this area requires Trunktracking or digital?

That might depend on where you are in the Bay, and what you want to
hear. For example, I'm in Santa Clara, and the city's system (PD,
Fire, etc.) is an 800 MHz Motorola trunked system.

San Francisco (city and county) uses a mixed (analog and digital) 800
MHz trunked system.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff isn't trunked, but it's digital.

Alameda County uses a Motorola analog trunked system.

A good resource to see what's trunked near you is:
http://www.radioreference.com/module...name=RR&stid=6
(click on the county names to see the various trunked systems in use).

It's likely that you will need a trunk-tracking scanner.

To listen to anything digital, you'll need one of the digital models.
At the moment, your choices a
Uniden 250 or 785 (with optional digital card)
Uniden 296 or 796 (digital card included)
RadioShack PRO-96
The message boards at www.strongsignals.net should be a good place to
check the features of the above radios.

-Don