THE MARITIMES SCANNING SITE

BASIC INFORMATION FOR NEW SCANNER LISTENERS
IN THE HALIFAX AREA

Last updated September 15, 2006

This page is for casual scanner listeners in the Halifax area who want a basic introduction to listening to the police and fire departments in the Halifax area.   For more detailed information you should go to the other sections of this website.

Many scanner listeners are primarily interested in listening to the police and aren't interested in details about the radio system.  Beyond that they might be interested in the fire department and the ambulances.  Only a few are interested in other things such as ships, aircraft and business services.  Therefore I will only give the essentials on the police and other emergency services.

1. The basic fact of life is that, at the minimum, you will require a scanner capable of receiving 800 MHz signals in order to hear much in the Halifax area.   Most services of interest have now migrated to 800 MHz trunk systems.  There is little to hear on VHF or 400 MHZ UHF with the major exception of the fire department paging system, as well as marine traffic in the harbour and aircraft on the aero band.

2. Most of these 800 MHz services are trunked and therefore it is best, but not actually necessary, to have a trunktracking scanner.   Unlike conventional systems where a conversation or a particular service stays on a particular frequency, trunking allows a large number of users to share a group of frequencies.   A conversation will jump around from one frequency to another, and if you try to follow on a conventional scanner, you are likely to get hung up on other conversations in the group of frequencies. Only a trunktracking scanner will enable you to follow the conversation from frequency to frequency.   This may not matter when the system is not busy - there may not be any other users on, but when it is busy, as it often is in Halifax, the conventional scanner just doesn't do the job.   The biggest advantage to having a trunktracker is that particular users can be locked out, so that only the ones you want will be heard.
Most services of interest operate through the provincial Trunked Mobile Radio System (TMRS).  This is a vast system covering the province that has several sites in the Metro area.  For most listeners it will be sufficient to enter the frequencies (or just the control channel if your scanner has this mode) for the Geizers Hill site.  For some of you it will be better to use another site and set of frequencies such as those for Sackville, Preston, Maritime Centre, Tantallon, Prospect.  Much the same traffic will be heard on each, though not necessarily exactly the same.  The information for this system is also available through the internal links found on the opening page.  Some services using this system are:  Ambulance and hospital, HRM Police, HRM Fire, HRM Works, NS government departments, the RCMP - but don't count on hearing the police unless you have a digital scanner. You may hear communications from distant parts of the province as well as local.

5. In order to listen to the RCMP in Nova Scotia, or to the Halifax Regional Police you will need a special scanner.   These agencies use digital transmissions and while digital scanners are becoming more common as this is rewritten in 2006, they remain fairly expensive (at least $400) and difficult to find in Canada.   

6. Geizers Hill is the hill overlooking Halifax with the tall TV transmitting tower on it (it has multiple white strobe lights on it).   For most of us living fairly close to the built up areas of Halifax and suburbs this site will be easily listenable.

7. For those interested in harbour traffic, Halifax Traffic, the ship control station, is on 156.6 (Marine Channel 12) and on 156.7 (14), the naval dockyard is on 156.5 (10), the towing company is on 156.35 (7) and the coast guard radio station is most often heard on 156.8 (16).  Other channels are also in use.

8. If you are interested in aircraft there are many many passing over Halifax daily and as well quite a lot of local traffic.  All of this is in the band 118 to 136 MHz (which not all scanners have)...  for specific frequencies see my aeronautical page.

If you want to know more about scanning other services or more about trunk-tracking please check out the other sections of this site.