Today we welcome Jim Heinrich.
Jim is here to share how he built his radio room. We will cover how his old gaming room slowly became a listening post. We’ll also cover some of the equipment you can find on his desk as well as some other resources Jim uses beyond radio hardware.
What You Need To Know
- Jim started off as a teenager, almost 40 years ago, listening just to his local police department on VHF.
- His listening habits have changed over the years, covering Public Safety to Aviation.
- It doesn’t take a lot of money to get started building your listening post.
- Jim says almost half of his shack are scanners that are older and would be considered obsolete.
- Anybody could start building their command posts, or their radio room, or their radio shack. It takes one radio and a desk to get started.
- When you decide what the theme is in the direction you want to take your shack in, Jim have found that having a small laptop and a monitor really enhances the experience.
- To listen public safety with the digital series scanners you really don’t have to have an outdoor antenna because they are high-powered repeated systems and reach out everywhere, says Jim.
- Recently Jim has purchased it DPD production aviation antenna that specifically tuned for VHF and UHF military.
- Some of Jim’s equipment includes three BC780XLT’s, an old RadioShack PRO-2030, and he has a BCT15 and a BCT15X.
- Having multiple radios allows you to dedicate radios to certain listening tasks.
- Jim’s old PRO-2030 is setup to listen to the local railroads.
- His HP1 and the 396 are setup to scan small lists like the crash rescue talk group at the Dayton International Airport with an alert built in.
- Jim has plans to program BCT15 series radios to do all the aviation monitoring because he had heard that they do well.
- Jim also uses Flightradar24 on an oversized monitor in the middle of my desk
- Also in use are Software Defined Radios and Unication Pagers.
- Jim wants to stress that his setup wasn’t purchased or completed overnight. This is years of buying and collecting radios that eventually allowed him to have this setup.
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