I remember the stories of my uncle who deove a tow truck and was a mechanic, he woupd listen in and when he heard a road accident, hed "Mysteriously" be passing by and tow the cars out of the way😂

I spent many happy hours in the 1970's listening to local police, Manchester airport, ambulance services etc. The radios were plentiful and sold at markets and cheap electrical stores. The units themselves were large, but light in weight. I opened the back of mine once to find most of it was empty except for the tiny amount of electronics and the speaker. It had a brushed stainless steel speaker grille with hundreds of tiny holes in it, and the ariel was about four feet long. Great fun.

I had a scanner in the 90s listening all emergency services, absolutely great times knowing what's going on around you

Way back in the mid 80's our fireground communication was to throw furniture or other objects out of a window if you ran into a problem.  If you threw your helmet that meant it was a life or death situation.  We did not have enough radios to go around.

London buses often speak with the Police on open frequencies, especially during football days. In cities like Brighton which heavily supplements the Police with police-like private security firms you can listen into responses to petty crime and usual night-scene chaos

Got my scanner in 1995, those were the good old days 😢

P0LICE the zero on that lamp bothers me.

As a young scallywag in the 60s , I always had a police wavelength receiver near to hand. Always good to know where they were.

I used to love listening to a good car-chase when I lived in London, much more exciting than anything else at the time.

Had hold of a cid radio once the special channels that normal scanners never had

wow here in Slovenia, the First responders’ freqs are a couple MHZ away from amateur and are not encrypted, Police and Military are tho ( as expected )

I remember listening to the police in the 90's and there was a report of a UFO crash in a field just a few miles from us. I asked my Dad if he could drive us down to the field, he was tempted but ultimately declined.

The next week in the local newspaper, several people who showed up at the field were arrested and charged for listening to the police communications.

You can also decode POCSAG and can pick out some aimed at paramedics in the UK.

in the UK back in the early 80's the cops used the lower broadcast FM radio frequencies, always was tuning into this on my 4 band radio.. then they moved to the higher frequencies..

I remember certain businesses men who always kept the police scanner on 😂

Years ago when pretty much everyone was using FM I dealt with an interference problem at an LFB site that was affecting their AM system, it was actually the heating thermostat in the radio site causing the interference and the LFB engineer made a note to inspect and replace all radio site thermostats with solid state ones rather than standard bimetal strip thermostats. There was great reluctance to even change to FM let alone digital back then. SCR based thermostats back then would likely have been quite expensive industrial units.

Coastguard?

It is not true that fire is the ONLY emergency service using unscrambled comms. RNLI / coastguard / VTS still use good old analog devices when working in emergency together.

In 2022, my area implemented a new radio system, which I in turn spent $1,800 dollars in scanners to receive, only for them 11 months later go encrypted. And now I use swear words