What is scanning?  Scanning monitor radios have become very popular.  Many people find that monitoring police and fire radio transmissions is very interesting and can be very exciting.  You can usually hear the news as it is being made.  You can also listen to other radio transmissions such as taxi's, street departments, etc.

METCAD recently implemented a new digital radio system called MDICE, short for METCAD Digital Interoperable Communications Environment, which can not be monitored by older, conventional scanners.  However, new scanners are avaialble which will enable you to monitor these digital communications.

An excellent resource for scanning is Radio Reference (RR).  You can view a listing of radio frequencies for several areas of interest in Champaign County and the neighboring areas.  You can read more about MDICE on their WIKI.

Many of the transmissions you will hear will be "coded" messages in the form of the APCO ten-codes.  Codes are not usually used to ecrypt a radio transmission but are used for brevity.  The links in the left column can be used to view the ten-code listing and Phonetic Alphabet below will provide you with a ten-code list as well as the phonetic alphabet.  Also included are links to a list of METCAD frequencies.