Sunday, December 14th, 2008
Rummaging around in some cupboards yesterday, I found this. It's a kind of radio and as the name suggests, it can scan a range of radio frequencies. The range of frequencies is enormous - long wave, medium wave, short wave, fm radio, police, fire, ambulance, taxis and so on. When cell phones were analogue, you could listen to them too, a fad which wore off for me in minutes. Did get one amusing one - a man in Cardiff phoning a massage parlour and trying to gently tease out of the girl what other services were on offer.
It was launched in 1993 and I think I got mine second hand for £200 a few years later. So I put some new batteries in and it worked just as well as it always did. Listened briefly to Cardiff air traffic control. Not a lot happening but then we don't get much air traffic, well at least at low altitude. It's illegal over here to listen to anything but public radio stations so being the law obiding citizen for which I am renowned, I moved on.
It has 20 dual function buttons and I couldn't find the manual, which being a crude Japanese to English translation was never much use anyway. So I surfed the net and found a decent manual. The most amazing thing was the reverence and awe for this machine even today and the fact that it only ceased production a few years ago. Newer scanners have far better LCD screens but few have any more features and very few match its sensitivity, its ability to capture weak signals out of the ether.
I knew it was good when I bought it but I did not realise that it was to become a legend.
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