Scanner Recorder is a handy little Windows program.

Plug the audio-out on your scanner into your sound card, and Scanner Recorder will record anything it picks up – but it’ll pause the recording when there’s silence. So if you’re not around when something goes down, you don’t miss a beat. AND you don’t have to listen to silence. It’s like skipping commercials! Pretty cool!

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I subscribe to a mailing list called SoCalScan. It’s a pretty high-traffic list (1200+ members) that discusses scanners and interesting frequencies in the Southern California area.

I’d say that 90% of the posts to the list are all related in some way to listening to fire or law enforcement. I hate listening to fire and law enforcement. I’d rather listen in on local businesses, film crews, and theme parks. But there’s no other SoCal-related email lists around that I know of, so I put up with it – crazies and all.

Oh yeah. There are quite a few whackjobs on there. There are people on there with multi-megabyte archives of photos of POLICE CARS AND HELICOPTERS. I’m not making this up, folks. They get off on that stuff.

Whenever a high-speed chase ends, someone will post something to the effect of “Tsk tsk. When will these ruffians learn that crime simply does not pay?” I honestly think a lot of them just failed the physical or something and never made it out of the police academy. I’d call it an unhealthy obsession.

There’s so much more floating over the airwaves than boring police calls and fires, but most people with scanners – at least on this list – don’t seem to care. It’s a little irritating, but what can ya do.