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Understanding Scanning
When tracking these types of systems, you might want
to remember these important points:
• Your scanner can track more than one trunking
system at a time and scan conventional and
trunked systems at the same time.
• The frequencies for many of the 800 MHz public
safety systems are listed in the National Public
Safety Trunked System Frequency Guide included
with your BCD396T scanner.
Conventional scanning is a simple concept. You enter
a frequency used by someone you want to monitor into
your scanner’s memory. For example, the police in your
area might transmit on 460.500 MHz, the fire department
on 154.445 MHz, the highway department on 37.900
MHz, etc. So when your scanner stops on a frequency,
you usually know who it is, and more importantly, you
can stop on a channel and listen to an entire
conversation. This type of scanning is easy and fun.
However, as the demand for public communications
has increased, many public radio users do not have
enough frequencies to meet their needs, creating a
serious problem. Trunking radio systems help solve
this problem.
Trunked Scanning
While conventional scanning worked great while there
were only a few groups wanting to use the
frequencies, with the advent of smaller, lower-cost
radios more and more agencies and businesses
wanted to take advantage of the utility of 2-way radio.
As a result, the bands that were used most became
full, so new users were not able to take advantage of
the technology as quickly as they wanted.
Trunking solved this frequency shortage by allowing
multiple groups to use the same set of frequencies in a
very efficient way. While each type of trunking system
operates a little differently (see the next few sections),
they all work on the same basic premise: even in a
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