I recently acquired a new “toy” that I have been playing with a lot lately. It’s the Radio Shack PRO-97 Handheld Scanner. This isn’t a scanner in the computer sense, it’s a “Police Scanner.” I have been a scanner enthusiast since I was a kid. My dad has also been one since the first models were introduced many years ago when I was a kid. I remember our family owning many scanners having as little as 8 channels, each one requiring the purchase of a “crystal” costing $5 – $15 each which contained a specific frequency for whatever particular service (Police, Fire, Weather, etc.) you wanted for your listening area. There was an LED for each channel, and the scanner would blink them in sequence as it scanned the 8 channels. Later on, crystal scanners were phased out for programmable models. Now you could just punch in the frequency you wanted and save it into a memory location in the scanner and there it was, at no extra cost. Early models had limited band coverage and as little as 10 to 50 channels.

The one I began looking at closely was the Radio Shack PRO-95. It was advertised at $149 back in November. With 1,000 channels, all the bands, and a PC interface, it looked really sweet and made me almost drool. So I began saving. Eventually I knew I’d have this hot little scanner in my hand with all of its cool features.

I researched everything I could about the Radio Shack PRO-95 when its price recently became amazingly affordable at $99. After I had convinced myself that I just couldn’t wait any longer (I hadn’t bought a new scanner in many years, after all) I started my search. It didn’t take long for me to learn that the PRO-95 had been discontinued and was no longer available anywhere. Radio Shack’s website showed that it was available at only 1 store in this area–the Zion Radio Shack. So I went there on a mission to find it. As you can imagine, they didn’t have it, even though the web said they did. They confirmed that it was shown to be in stock–1 unit–at their store, and then said that it must be an inventory miscount, because they don’t have one. They did, however, have its replacement model–the PRO-97–which had just come in this week. It was a much better scanner with many more features. The price was $149–the same price that the PRO-95 was in November. After thinking about it and researching the additional features, I took the plunge. 

The first exciting revelation I had with this new scanner was the ability to connect it to a PC and program it via the computer! This required the additional purchase of a PC interface cable (serial port connection) and transfer software–which Radio Shack employees themselves seem to be clueless about. I learned everything from the web before purchasing, so I had a pretty good idea of what it was capable of. There are several different applications available for interfacing this scanner with a PC, and after some testing I found Starrsoft Win97 (specific for the PRO-97 scanner) to be the best by far. It amazingly allows loading and saving of virtually every single feature on the PRO-97, including not only saving the 1,000 channel frequencies it will hold, but also all the “little things” like how long you want the backlight to stay lit when you turn it on, whether you want it to automatically turn on the backlight whenever you press a key, whether the “Priority” feature is on or off, etc., and many of these features aren’t even programmable without the software!

You don’t know what a relief it is to be able to automatically save or load the entire scanner contents like this though. I can remember spending hours and hours programming mine and my dad’s handheld and desktop scanners after their batteries have died and we lost 100 or so channels from the memory banks. Sheesh, what a pain. Imagine having to do that with the THOUSAND channels this scanner now has! It takes less than a minute to transfer the entire scanner to the PC or vice versa. So basically it’s no sweat at all. Program it ONCE and I never have to do it again. And you also not only program a frequency into each memory location but also a text description of what it is. So whenever that channel talks on the scanner you see exactly what channel it is–in English–on the display.

And as the commercials always put it: But wait–There’s more! After manually programming the 100 or so local frequencies I had, I did another web search and actually found a site dedicated to scanner enthusiasts (RadioReference.com), and it includes the ability to let you transfer entire categories from their database directly into your scanner! A little more searching verified that this particular scanner was indeed compatible with it, so I was golden. I joined the website, and was then asked to donate a small fee to enable the ability to interface with their database (and also enable several other site features). So I paid them a few dollars and I could instantly connect to the site directly through StarrSoft’s Win97 and transfer entire frequency groups.

One thing I like about this is that I don’t even have to program the text descriptions into each channel now. The descriptions are transferred to each channel with the frequencies themselves. But imagine the possibilities here: Since you narrow your search by country, by state, then by city, you can instantly choose any new city–for example Milwaukee–and transfer all of their frequencies into a single bank of your scanner. This is awesome, very fast, and simple to do with Win97. You can even specify which Bank to transfer the frequencies to (the PRO-97 has 10 banks of 100 channels each), and name each Bank with a text description. So now my PRO-97 has a “Milwaukee Area” bank, a “Racine Area” bank, and two “Kenosha Area” banks, and I still have over 600 channels unused. Scanners have certainly come a long way, and I’m really having fun with this new one.  Now all I need to do is get my dad to buy one and I can instantly program his with no effort whatsoever!