InterceptRadio.com Forums

I spent a good amount of time playing with scanners about 7-10 years ago and had a blast. This weekend I was digging through some hardware boxes and came across my old icom pcr-1000 and it brought back the rush to pick up radio monitoring again. I realize much has changed since then and I was hoping to get an idea about the worthiness of upgrading to a new scanner at this point.

currently I have a very early icom pcr-1000 (unblocked) and an old uniden sc150 handheld with an added d-tap. With the icom it appears that a lot of the software is pretty old and doesn't run on vista. Is there any value to these older units?

over the past year i've been listening online to the streams from the SPD and thought it would be fun to get my own scanner setup as I imagine i'm missing a lot. I realize I would need something with trunking support. Is there a recommended setup or unit that would be worth picking up? With the changes and rebanding on the horizon is it worth buying a unit right now? I'm glad I found this forum and I look forward to spending time here.

Rebanding is coming in the next 2-5 years. Everything will stop working for a while. Read all about it here, here, here, here and here.
If you're only interested in Seattle PD then you can grab any analog scanner that'll do Motorola trunking. Any model that doesn't support rebanding will obviously break, but some that do will also break due to the shuffled band plan that is being implimented.

I always regretted selling my PCR-1000.

If you're looking to sell it, let me know.

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Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!

US Patent #7546085 issued 6/9/09, describing the invention ("Shuffled Band Plan").

TX frequency=Base Frequency+[(759−N)*Channel Spacing] Specifically, if the determined band plan is “Band Plan 3—Non-splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 160, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 806.0125 MHz. If the determined band plan is “Band Plan 4—Splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 161, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 806.0250 MHz. Specifically, if the determined band plan is “Band Plan 5—International Non-splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 0, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 806.0125 MHz. If the determined band plan is “Band Plan 6—International Splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 0, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 806.0000 MHz.

RX frequency=Base Frequency+[(759−N)*Channel Spacing] In the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to the lowest frequency that a repeater in the site with Band Plan 3 utilizes for transmissions. Specifically, if the determined band plan is “Band Plan 3—Non-splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 160, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 851.0125 MHz and the Channel Spacing relates to 25,000 Hz. If the determined band plan is “Band Plan 4—Splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 161, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 851.0250 MHz and the Channel Spacing relates to 25,000 Hz. Specifically, if the determined band plan is “Band Plan 5—International Non-splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 0, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 851.0125 MHz and the Channel Spacing relates to 25,000 Hz. If the determined band plan is “Band Plan 6—International Splinter & Shuffle,” and the assigned voice channel is between 759 and 0, then in the above equation, the Base Frequency relates to 851.0000 MHz and the Channel Spacing relates to 25,000 Hz.

I'm pretty sure King County won't be using that algorithm.