The Best Police Scanners of 2024 (2024)

FAQs

Are police scanners worth buying? ›

Police scanners help monitor the radio frequencies used by local police departments and allow you to listen to their internal communications. It's totally legal, and a great way to understand how first responders in your area are promoting public safety and dealing with major events or breaking news on a daily basis.

The Uniden R8 is simply the best dash-mount radar detector in 2024. Simply put, we consider it the new king of radar detectors. The Uniden R8 detector is infused with dual LNAs (low noise amplifiers to maximize performance and reduce its detectability to Spectre RDDs) and increased processing power.

Trunked Radio Systems in Depth. Trunked radio systems centrally manage a pool of channels, and intelligently switch users to whatever channel is open at a given time. This is often a difficult concept for scanner enthusiasts to understand, as trunking represents a paradigm shift in design of the system.

One of the best ways to follow police activity is to use scanners and listen to the radio chatter. This may sound legally questionable, but the Communications Act of 1934 established that radio airwaves are public property. It's well within your rights to listen.

Analog/Digital scanners pick up both Analog and Digital and are more expensive than Analog scanners due to the additional circuitry and processing necessary to receive and reproduce legible voice from the Digital systems.

American cities are encrypting their emergency radio communications over concerns about safety and privacy. Ernesto Londoño reported from Indianapolis, where he spent hours listening to emergency radio chatter.

Whether the scanner is for yourself or is a gift, just put in the city/state where it will be used. The site will instantly tell you about the radio systems in use in the area the scanner will be used and will show you the available scanner options that match up with the radio systems in the region.

Is Uniden still in business? ›

Uniden operates globally, but the main commercial activities are situated in the United States and Japan.

The R7 is one of the best radar detectors out there and has very good range in K and Ka band. You cannot have increase range with too much filtering to minimize false alerts. You just need to find the sweet spot that works well for you. If you are a newbie and wanted to learn, this may work well for you.

In some big cities such as Boston a basic scanner will work fine. But in Los Angeles as well as the backwoods of Michigan, Colorado and other states, you need a digital scanner. If you are unsure of the type of scanner you need for the area in which you'll be scanning, please check out our Compare Scanners page.

The Uniden BCD996P2 is a APCO-25 Phase II capable base/mobile TrunkTracker V scanner with Dynamic Memory Architecture. It is an upgrade to the BCD996XT, and direct sibling to the BCD325P2 released shortly after. This scanner became available to the market in March, 2015.