Those links are helpful!
Thanks again! These links to Oregon frequencies will be helpful. And knowing that most of the "action" here is non-digital will help me with my decisions too. I have read people saying that eventually the police everywhere will go digital, but they also say that it is very expensive for them to do that. There is very little money for police efforts here. There is not even enough money for jails. People arrested for just about anything short of a homicide are released after a day or two due to over-crowding in the jails.
So I think it will be a long time before they make any expensive upgrades to the radio systems here. That means I can buy a scanner that does not have all the digital and trunking features and still do pretty well with it. This is good.
I have an old real "cheapie" multi-band radio that is not even a brand that anyone would recognize. Must have bought it at a garage sale or at goodwill for $5 some many years ago. The name is "Electro-Brand Public Service UHF Citizens Radio." (It does not have the citizens band on it though).
It does have the 150-165 frequencies of our local police on it and it even has 600 - 655MHz. I haven't mentioned this radio before because when I tried it a few times last week I could not find anything on the SW, PB, UHF or air bands. But tonight I attached that wire I strung up as an antenna and it helped. Thanks to those frequency links you gave me, I was able to take better aim and I did hear two or three police transmissions on that thing.
This thing is very very touchy to tune and the sound quality is terrible. It seems to "grab and hold" onto any signal I come across - although not necessarily right AT the strongest part of the signal's frequency. Then if I try to go a little further to sharpen the tuning, it seems to hold and not release it easily. When it does release it, the signal is off scale completely. So sometimes I have to deliberately go beyond the signal and come back at it from the other direction to try again to get right on it before the radio "locks" onto it prematurely. That is the best I can describe what it is doing.
I am thinking it might be a superheterodyne regenerative circuit. Somewhere in my memory there seems to be something about that kind of circuit that seems to fit this sort of 'locking on' to signals even to the exclusion of nearby signals. This is also a real problem when two signals are close together because it holds onto the first one I encounter and doesn't let it go until I have dialed past the 2nd one. So again, I have to reverse direction so as to come at the other signal first. If I don't keep going back and forth I would not even discover that here were two signals close together. One of the police signals I found tonight was next to some kind of repeating CW that had almost a heart-beat sort of rhythm to it - on top of a steady signal. It sounded much like when someone presses their transmit microphone on and off without speaking, but this thing had a constant rhythm to it.
Anyway I guess I am kind of babbling...
Oh, the other thing that antenna helped me to find on that cheapie was a airplane on it's way to the local airport. I heard him broadcast his headings and altitude a few times. Didn't hear the tower though. I am about 12 miles from the airport.
This cheap little radio did help me confirm that there definitely some local police signals can be picked up without digital equipment. I wouldn't have found them though if you hadn't given me those frequency links!
I could only hear the officer's voice well enough to understand. The dispatcher's voice was way too quiet in relation to the background noise - and the squelch on that thing is almost useless.
Overall though, this is all progress. I am enjoying this.
