On Saturday, August 9, 2003, at 11:00 AM, Anne McCandless wrote:
I may be wrong, but are you saying that some of the postal people have
scanners in their trucks to keep track of what's going on? If that is so,
you better have them check out the state law. Unless they have an FCC
amateur radion license or are licensed law enforcement officers, it's
against the law to have a scanner in a motor vehicle.
It's questionable if Minnesota's "scanner law" would survive a court test- radio regulation has been pretty much pre-empted by the federal government. The Postal Service is also a quasi-federal agency and may also claim federal pre-emption. None of the scanners I have seen in use at the Postal Service were "mobile" so they do not come under the purview of the "scanner law" anyway. I do not own a scanner, and monitor using the extended receive capability that is standard in virtually all amateur radio transceivers today.
BTW, we also monitor other post office operations a lot because most of our radios cover only our own channel. That way if say, mail processing needs mail trays, we already have them located and a driver standing by to deliver them by the time they call us in the phone for them. For the same reason a scanner is pretty much standard equipment in outstate squad cars- the officers, deputy sheriffs, troopers, etc. monitor each others frequencies so they get a little more advance warning if a chase or a storm is headed their way. By contrast, with our new system Minneapolis police can no longer talk directly to their St.Paul counterparts, never mind another county over...
Frankly, I think that the police being able to communicate with other law
enforcement agencies along with the added security of the new system, far
outweighs any inconvience to the public.
Problem is, communication between law enforcement agencies with the new system is more difficult if not impossible. Under the old VHF and UHF FM systems all law enforcement radios had at least one common intersystem channel. In fact, all over the country you will find these "intersystem" channels in law enforcement radios. Once Minneapolis Police went to digital trunked they can only communicate with other radios on their digital trunked network. They cannot even talk directly to many other agencies using the same system, never mind other types of trunked and conventional systems. Even if all the metro agencies ever go over to the new system, most of Minnesota will never go over- the cost of putting in the larger number of repeater stations and environmental restrictions simply make statewide conversion impossible. Thusly Minneapolis and the other metro agencies that have gone to the new system will be an island in a state and country of better functioning conventional systems.
If you are judging police
performance by what you hear on a scanner, you are missing an awful lot.
And now we have even less to go by. Do you not wonder why the Minneapolis Police Department has muzzled officers and attempted to make routine communications secret?
Iunderstand that buying a new scanner (and in time, I'm sure the cost will
come down ) is a pain, but that's the price of progress.
As I've stated before in my technical analysis of the system this isn't progress. The other day I bought a new amateur radio transciever- for a fourth of what were paying for the new police radios it has far more capabilities, yet it can still communicate with the "legacy" radios and systems just fine.
abandoned in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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