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I’ve never really been interested in scanner monitoring though I appreciate the technology behind it and I have dabbled with them a bit in the distant past. Up until 15 or so years ago it was a simple matter of plugging in frequencies for your local area in order to hear what’s out there.

Then municipalities started using trunked systems to allow sharing of frequencies among various users. Scanners were designed that could follow the various trunked system types, and their difficulty of programming ramped up progressively. Newer & more complex trunking systems were developed, PL and CTCSS tones were required – and the fun factor faded among many. It just wasn’t worth the effort required.

And if you travel to another area, all that programming has to be re-done.

A soon-to-be-released (October 1) new scanner from Uniden changes all that in a major way.

To program it, you just punch in your zip code. That’s it. If you’re on the road and have a GPS receiver in your car, hook the two together and the scanner’s freqs are updated as you travel through new areas.

All that confusing alphabet soup of trunking and modulation acronyms and parameters - P25, EDACS, talk groups, LTR, PL tones etc – are now transparent to the user.

It’s called the HomePatrol and it looks interesting, even to a non-scanner-type-but-interested-nonetheless guy like me.

So new its website isn’t even finished yet, but the owner’s manual is available for (free!) download. There is also a YouTube video that explains its most basic capabilities:

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Check out this blog for more/updated info.

Pretty groovy.

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