LoneWolf said:
That's a real good idea just starting.... What type and brand do you have? A very handy bit of kit to have in times of no communication...
I was looking at one of those programmable Baofeng units from Ebay, but I have been told they are illegal in Australia?...
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/UV-9R-P...=202799557023095eb7419fa54171ba42f4e0b6f9ba77
LW....
Gidday, LW.
I have two Uniden UBCD396XT scanners. I originally bought one for myself and one for a mate who has now passed away ,to use for the CFA stuff and then i found out you could listen to the police ,ambos,DSE etc and i learned how to manually program it ,rather than download the software with the frequencies in it.
Now the CFA is the only service i can listen to after all the others went to encryption.
This is the one i have ;
https://uniden.com.au/product/ubcd396xt/ It is P25 phase 1 .
There is a bloke in victoria who programs all the CFA radios ,so i sent the 2 scanners to him to wipe the old stuff off and re-program with all the latest frequencies and the correct files ,codecs and systems to run them both properly ,as well as separating the regions into their own groups and channel banks.
I could have done most of it myself, ,but this bloke sets it up more efficiently than i can.
The fireground channels are a god send. If you are within about 30 to 40 kms of a major fire , you can usually hear the
IMC ( incident management control ) at the fire .ESTA dedicate a channel to communicate with firies on the scene who are in the thick of it. The channel will be a simple number like 265 or 252 .There is a bit of a method operating the scanner to access the fireground channel ,but it is all legal and very informative. I had to use it for the Haddon fire in March or April . A colleague`s Mum was caught in the middle of the fire and he couldn`t make contact for awhile and when he could, he relayed some of the info about the situation to her.
There are better scanners out there that are already programmed and ready to go like the Uniden UBCD436pt P25 phase 2 . More expensive ,but would be well worth the money. The X in the model number means it is the Aussie version. I think UBCD stands for Uniden Bear Cat Digital . They use digital and analogue frequencies.
