Fire nearby - Best freeware Police/Fire Scanner (which do YOU use?)

Horace Algiers · 2016-09-27T03:11:07+00:00

Which free police/fire scanner do you recommend that does not have intrusive ads? There's a fire, called the "Loma Fire" nearby, near the site of the big earthquake of 89 (also probably in sight of where Jeff lives): Some pictures are: Lots of WISP and radio dishes are at risk! This fire started before 3pm today so is still less than 1,000 acres at this point, but it's gonna grow bigger (I can see the flames from my house, even at night - where the glow changes with the flames) since it's the fastest growing mushroom cloud I've seen in years! I had *thought* in the past that the 5.0 scanner was the best free scanner for listening to the "CalFire SCU" frequencies. But, after installing it, I was disgusted with the plethora of super annoying ads, the likes of which I have never seen before - they're that obnoxious. Since the 5.0 Scanner seems to have gone completely over to the dark side, Googling, I can find plenty of listings of other free Android & iOS police/fire scanners, so I simply ask you for the one *you* use that has the least amount of obtrusive ads. Android: iOS: Which free police/fire scanner do you recommend that does not have intrusive ads?

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Horace Algier 9 years ago

Thanks Jeff for that hint that Broadcastify also *records* transmissions.

I would love to re-listen to that communication yesterday where clearly a leader chastised a crew for allowing other crews to go back to San Jose without telling the leader.

To answer the original question, it seems that Broadcastify is really the way to go. a. It is usable as a simple browser desktop link b. The free apps seem to use it anyway c. It archives for you (which I didn't know)

Given that a scanner for emergencies needs to be KISS, I love the link in my emergency folder to your suggested site.

BTW, today I called the Cal Fire folks and they told me it's about 2K acres, with about 100 trucks and 50 teams, a score each of choppers, dozers, and tankers, and about 1,000 fire personnel.

Is that big or small in terms for this area? (I missed the huge pre-earthquake fires so I've only seen little ones in the interim.)

Nice to know there are recordings on Broadcastify.

I think broadcastify directly, or an app that uses broadcastify, is the canonical way to go for a KISS emergency fire scanner in the desktop emergency folder.

I haven't tried to make a link on iOS from the browser, but that should be easily doable for the iOS users.

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Jeff Liebermann 9 years ago

Broadcastify MIGHT work, but there's a problem. Many of the scanners reflected by Broadcastify over multiple channels. There's no guarantee that any particular scanner will be listening to a frequency of interest. That causes big problems when there are two or more channels with active incidents. At the time when I made the recording that I mentioned, there was a local only scanner for SLV (San Lorenzo Valley) area fire. It's now gone.

You might try doing your own recording: The difference between these recorders, and the common music recorders, is that scanner recorders stop recording when there's no audio. All the dead air gaps disappear. Most also have a real time marker system, so you know when something was heard.

For fire, you might want to also try: which has recordings of fire dispatches. The recordings are for dispatches and callouts, and are not intended for archiving the entire incident. Using the RSS feeds are the best way to follow the dispatches.

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Horace Algier 9 years ago

Good point in that any one "feed" on broadcastify can be made up of multiple channels, not all of which are recorded (nor are both sides necessarily recorded).

I've always wanted a recorder on the mobile device which skips over dead space.

As you can tell from my desktop screenshots, I use "Easy Voice Recorder" freeware, but it doesn't skip over dead space AFAIK.

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Looking for a free sound recorder on the mobile device which starts and stops when the sound level is high enough, I find this:

Auto Recorder by Giuseppe Romano

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The settings have a few options, such as the file type and size, and the pro version adds other options such as whether to start automatically or wait for your command, or even whether to start from a text message.

It doesn't have a setting to change its default storage location, but I can easily enough use a freeware file redirector to automagically move it from the local storage to the flash drive. If folks know of a better freeware audio recorder that will stop and start based on volume for either iOS or Android, that would be useful.

Interesting, they seem to have 30-second and 90-second and 30-minute snippets recorded at various qualities. Seems like they could do with a single recording, at a single quality, but I guess that they want to do it right.

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