Mr Notty

A couple good resources for you… http://www.scanboston.com/boston.htm is really detailed, and has a list of channels in order. 460.15 is just a detective frequency; sometimes you’ll hear interesting stuff but there’s not a lot of activity. I’d put the whole list of 16 channels in. (Though I’ve never really heard anything above channel 13.)

Check out http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?ctid=1225 as well. The Radio Reference site is usually my go-to resource for frequencies. That link is to the Boston page, but they have stuff for the whole country.

One of the things I like is that they’re cheap enough that I’m not too worried about damaging them. I took them with us kayaking one time, knowing that if one fell overboard, it wouldn’t be a big loss. The other thing I like is that, from what I’m told, you can dial 911 with any phone, regardless of whether it’s on contract, so if an emergency had come up, we could have used our “radios” to call 911 for help. (But fortunately, I’ve never had occasion to test this. And please don’t trust my third-hand information on the matter.)

One big downside I realized is that no brick-and-mortar stores seem to sell chargers for these things anymore. You can still find them online, but if you do what I did and go on vacation forgetting the charger, you’ll find that Best Buy, RadioShack, and the Sprint/Nextel store don’t have anything to fit.