Founded 1996 - Proudly Serving the SoCal Scanner Community for 30 Years
Southern California Monitoring Association
Somewhere beneath the broken concrete and twisted debris of a collapsed building in Venezuela, rescuers heard what every search team hopes for after an earthquake: Signs of life. Hours had passed. Buildings had fallen. Families were missing. The work was dangerous, slow, and exhausting. But deep inside the rubble, a mother and her nine-month-old baby…
Amateur radio groups are watching closely after the Federal Communications Commission approved limited use of 430–440 MHz spectrum by AST SpaceMobile, a satellite-to-cellular company sometimes described as a Starlink rival in the growing direct-to-device space communications market. The issue involves AST SpaceMobile’s planned low-earth-orbit satellite constellation. The company is building a space-based mobile broadband network…
San Bernardino County officials have opened the new Valley Communications Center in San Bernardino, a major public safety facility built to improve emergency communications, dispatch coordination and large-incident management across the county. The county celebrated the ribbon cutting on Tuesday, June 2, for the approximately 75,000-square-foot center, which brings together key emergency communications and emergency…
Video Spotlight The Martin Mars flying boat is one of those aircraft that almost seems too large, too unusual, and too specialized to be real — but it was very real, and for many years it served as one of the most impressive aerial firefighting aircraft in the world. The Mars began life as a…
A late-night U.S. military training exercise involving helicopters, simulated weapons fire and controlled explosions startled residents in northeast Pasadena Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, while a separate military exercise involving helicopter activity was also announced in Irvine. The Pasadena drill took place at the former St. Luke Medical Center property near East Washington Boulevard…
An unverified B-2 claim highlights a real shift in modern monitoring: radios, open-source data, and AI are now part of the same picture A Chinese defense-technology company says it used artificial intelligence to detect and analyze radio-signal activity associated with U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers during recent American strikes on Iran. The claim…
The Federal Communications Commission has issued a new warning to Jack Gerritsen, a longtime figure in Southern California amateur radio enforcement history, after FCC agents traced an alleged unlicensed amateur radio transmission to his Bell, California, location. In a Notice of Unlicensed Operation dated May 28, 2026, the FCC Enforcement Bureau said it received multiple…
The U.S. Air Force is preparing to buy thousands of new handheld survival radios designed to help locate and recover downed pilots and aircrew in hostile or remote areas. The new radio is the Next Generation Survival Radio, or NGSR. It is intended to replace the older Combat Survivor Evader Locator radio, commonly known as…
Three New Rosenbauer PANTHERs for LAX Three new Rosenbauer PANTHER aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicles are on their way to Los Angeles International Airport, continuing a planned refresh of the airport’s specialized emergency response fleet. According to information released by Rosenbauer America, the trucks are being delivered to the Los Angeles Fire Department for use…
