Uniden Home Patrol - a new kind of scanner

Radio scanners are playing an interesting role in the use of social media in disasters - for instance people listening to local scanner traffic and tweeting the latest updates. A big boon to this has been the live audio feeds available on Radio Reference. However, we're not always by a computer or able to connect to the internet during an incident, so a radio scanner is an excellent piece of any disaster kit or for anyone interested in keeping up with events. The widespread move by public safety to digital, trunked systems though has meant that programming a radio scanner to work correctly for the area you are in requires pretty high technical skills and a lot of time, and even just choosing the right scanner is complicated (see my post on this). So I'm very happy to see the Uniden HomePatrol-1 come to market. This really is a revolutionary kind of scanner that just about anyone can use. It comes linked with the RadioReference database, so programming the scanner is as simple as typing in your ZIP code and selecting the kinds of broadcast (police, fire, etc) you wish to receive. It does just about any system - analog, digital, vhf, uhf, 800Mhz and so on. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea, but for someone who wants to just get listening with the minimum of hassle, it seems perfect.