Southern California Monitoring Association
The Garden Grove hazardous materials emergency is a perfect example of why public safety radio encryption matters. A chemical tank incident at the GKN Aerospace facility forced large evacuations, road closures, school closures, and a massive multi-agency response. At one point, fire officials warned that the tank could either rupture and spill hazardous material or…
From the Sky-Hi News: The Grand County Communications Center announced that, effective May 22, countywide public safety radio communications, including law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services, will transition to an encrypted radio platform. This change is being implemented to enhance responder safety, protect sensitive information and reduce the risk of public safety radio traffic being misused,…
Seth Hettena The After-Action Report Mar 04, 2026 A new shortwave numbers station appeared the day the bombs fell. Nobody knows who’s running it. A mysterious shortwave radio station began broadcasting strings of numbers in Farsi on the day Israel and the United States first struck Iran. It hasn’t stopped since. Numbers stations, as they’re…
A troubling incident involving unauthorized transmissions on public safety radio channels in Pittsburgh is drawing national attention within the radio monitoring community. Over several days in early March 2026, an unknown individual broadcast threatening and hateful messages over a public safety radio channel used by Pittsburgh police and emergency services. For scanner listeners and radio…
A late-December copper wire theft at a major City of Los Angeles communications site exposed a vulnerability in municipal infrastructure, temporarily knocking a citywide radio system offline and forcing officials to curtail parking and traffic enforcement operations for safety reasons. The incident occurred at a prominent radio communications tower located in Elysian Park, just north…
Goodbye, Scanner. Austin Police, Fire, EMS will Stop Making Messages Available to Public Public safety agencies in Austin — police, fire and EMS — will soon go radio silent to the public after they switch to an encrypted radio system. This means that the current publicly available scanner information, which residents can use to listen…
WASHINGTON (AP) — The extraordinary scene of U.S. fighter jets getting ready to strike a Chinese balloon had many people along the Carolina coast straining their necks and pointing their smartphones to the sky to capture the moment of impact. But a group of aviation enthusiasts was, instead, intently scanning radio frequencies for the exchanges between the…
How to Tune In Listening to police and fire department radio calls can be a fascinating and informative experience. Whether you’re curious about what’s happening in your community or just interested in emergency services, there are a number of ways to tune in to these broadcasts. In this article, we’ll explore the different methods available…
FirstNet Push-to-Talk (PTT) service, provided by AT&T, delivers the performance that public safety needs and can be an LMR alternative for some agencies, according to the captain of a New Jersey police department that conducted a beta trial of the new offering. “I think it’s really going to be a game-changer for public-safety communications,” Capt….
