Police Call King Calls It Quits

[x635 4,066]

Police Call King Calls It Quits

By Kevin Poulsen

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69133,00.html

02:00 AM Oct. 11, 2005 PT

It was the best day amid the worst years of Gene Hughes' life. He was 13 years old and seeking escape from the loneliness of a Los Angeles foster home by playing with an AM radio his uncle had mailed him. Tuning around the dial, he picked up something different from the dance hall music and campy radio dramas that normally spilled from the tinny speaker -- something unexpectedly genuine. "I suddenly heard strange voices, women broadcasting addresses and numeric codes," he recalls.

He quickly figured out that he'd somehow tuned into Los Angeles Police Department dispatchers crisply directing the city's black-and-white police cars to real robberies, domestic disturbances and traffic accidents throughout the City of Angels.

That was 1940, nearly a half-century before shows like Cops would turn live police action into mass entertainment. And what might have sounded to someone else's ears like unwanted interference from a city transmitter, was to Hughes the pulsing music of an invisible world. He bought a map and started marking out the police calls with a pencil. As he moved into adulthood, his interest only increased, and he invested in specialized radio receivers. "If they had the word, I guess you'd have called me a nerd," says Hughes.

But that nerdiness paid off. In 1964, in a bet with his wife, Hughes took all the information he'd accumulated -- call signs, frequencies and codes for police, fire, paramedics and other agencies -- and rolled it up into a 16-page manual titled Police Call.

It was the start of something big. Under Hughes' direction, Police Call would eventually expand into nine regional volumes covering the entire continental United States, with a peak circulation of a half-million copies. Updated annually, it would sell countless thousands of radio scanners and play a crucial role in incubating and growing the hobby of radio monitoring, which traces a line from the cop watchers of the 1970s to the railfans of the '90s and the NASCAR dads of today.

Along the way, Police Call would help spawn local and national clubs and organizations, spark brushfire controversies over information disclosure, and turn Gene Hughes -- a pen name -- into a household word among scanner buffs and anyone who spent too much time at Radio Shack when they were kids.

Last month, Hughes, now 77, announced he was closing down Police Call after 41 years. Radio heads call it the end of an era. "He's a giant in the hobby," says Peter Laws, 42-year-old scanning buff and founder of a popular e-mail list dedicated to monitoring. "I'm not saying there would have been no hobby without him, but the hobby would have been very different without him."

It began with a bit of marital banter. Confronted with Hughes' compulsion to gather and organize information on Los Angeles' radio spectrum, his wife, Mitzi, pointed out the obvious. "She said, 'You're doing the stupidest thing in the world,'" recalls Hughes. "I said, 'I bet people would pay for this.'" That first edition of Police Call sold 800 copies through a Southern California radio shop. Mitzi did the cover art -- a sketch of a police car and a fire truck with lightning bolts radiating from their antennas. "I never imagined there would be a second copy," says Hughes.

But there was a second edition, then a third and a fourth. The book continued as a Southern California phenomenon for the better part of a decade. Then, in 1973, Hughes teamed up with a computer jockey named George Switlyk who knew how to crunch the opaque FCC frequency databases into meaningful data, and the pair began banging out nine national editions covering nearly the entire country.

Their timing was impeccable: Three years later, the first programmable scanners hit the consumer market, and cracked it wide open.

Before then, the most flexible monitoring equipment differed little in operation from a transistor radio -- if you wanted to listen to the sheriff's department, you'd manually set the dial to the department's dispatch frequency, and rest it there. Alternatively, you could use a scanning receiver capable of cycling through different channels, but you needed separate, pre-cut crystals attuned to each frequency.

While crude by today's standards, the first programmable scanner, sold by a now-defunct company called Tennelec, was a breakthrough: It could be programmed on the fly to monitor up to eight different channels, rapidly cycling through them, stopping wherever it picked up a transmission, then moving on again. No crystals required.

It was Headline News where only CBS had been; RSS instead of HTTP. Here, a cop runs the license plate of a suspicious car; there, a paramedic radios the emergency room that they're rolling into with an accident victim; a moment later a fire dispatcher summons two more engines to a downtown blaze. Back to the cop and the driver has a warrant and someone's going to jail.

The scanner was a hit at the 1976 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. But it was clear that people were going to need information to go with the new gadget: a TV Guide, of sorts, for reality media. A buyer for the Fort Worth, Texas-based electronics chain Radio Shack figured it out quick, and hunted down Hughes on the show's floor.

"Are you still printing that book of frequencies?" Leon Lutz asked in a Texas drawl. Hughes said he was. "Well, I guess I gotta buy some," Lutz said.

Radio Shack had 2,000 stores in shopping centers and strip malls around the country, and the company was going into monitoring in a big way -- it would soon have its own line of programmable scanners. The company's first purchase order for Police Call was for 65,000 books, says Hughes, more than seven times his previous print run. "I remember opening that envelope and, wow, the excitement lifted me off the floor."

Hughes and Switlyk would sell the books through Radio Shack for years to come.

"The scanners helped sell the book and the book helped sell the scanners," says Paul Opitz, former product development director for Radio Shack. "Drop either one out of the equation and the numbers go down significantly. It was a very nice symbiotic relationship."

But law enforcement agencies weren't used to the public listening in, and Police Call courted controversy from the beginning. "There were a lot of police that did not want their frequencies known," says Hughes. "I'd tell them they could go down to the FCC and see them."

Hughes voluntarily omitted some frequencies that he thought particularly sensitive, like FBI and Secret Service channels, but he says he never cut a frequency under external pressure. Crooks, of course, were delighted with scanners, and with Police Call. "People sent me several clippings where the police broke up burglary rings, and right there in the picture you could see my book sitting on the table," Hughes says with a chuckle.

Several states passed laws against driving with a scanner -- statutes that remain on the books today, but are rarely enforced.

But the typical scanner owner isn't a criminal. And if the very term police scanner summons an acrid flavor of dangerous isolation -- the whiff of neighborhood busybodies, cop wannabes and weird shut-ins -- the reality is broader: sports fans, airplane buffs and off-duty emergency workers have all found scanners useful.

When, 15 years ago, Hughes hinted he might stop publishing railroad frequencies, he was deluged with mail from railway aficionados -- a reader base he didn't even know he had. Today, scanners are must-have items for many NASCAR fans. "Being able to listen to the dialogue between the pit crew and the driver really adds a lot to the race," says Opitz, who's now a product manager at scanner giant Uniden and uses a scanner in his weekend sport of tornado chasing.

With each edition, Police Call had more information to track (recent editions have included CD-ROMs). Advancing technology allowed electromagnetic spectrum to be handled in thinner slices, which meant more channels to go around.

At the same time, radio systems became more complicated over the years, forcing costly upgrade cycles on listeners. Cities began adopting systems that used "trunking," a computer-controlled technique for making efficient use of frequencies, which rendered old scanners obsolete. Digital radio required even newer, fancier electronics to intercept. The encrypted transmissions now being used in some areas make monitoring arguably impossible, and, for the first time, definitely illegal.

"It's switching over so fast," says Hughes. "If you look at the major cities, they've almost all switched to trunked, and they're switching to digital every day…. Orange County is not only digital, it's encrypted, which of course by law you can't listen to."

That, says Hughes, is why the 2005 edition of Police Call will be the last: Scanning is a waning pastime; people are put off by the growing complexity and cost. The internet has also been bad for the hobby, the way it's bad for all hobbies, Hughes says -- because it's an attractive diversion. (Still a technophile, Hughes has been on the net since before the web).

But he admits that he really lost his love of the home business when Switlyk, his friend and business partner since the 1970s, died in 2000 of heart failure. "Broke my heart," he says. "We had a partnership that kept going for over 20 years."

Hughes and Mitzi celebrated their 50th anniversary last year. Hughes says he has no plans to pass Police Call on to someone else -- his children and grandchildren don't want it -- nor will he offer to sell the Police Call title to Radio Shack, which has announced no plans for a replacement book. Indeed, the web is a trove of resources for scanner buffs, from frequency lists to streaming audio feeds of radio traffic, making printed frequency books less important than they once were. Scanning buff Laws admits he hasn't bought Police Call since 2000.

But Radio Shack says it's sorry to see the book close. "There were many resources that attempted to compete with the callbooks," says Radio Shack buyer Wayne Wilson in an e-mail. "But for a long time, the callbook was the only resource that translated endless FCC database entries like Motorola into the actual services that were on those frequencies. No other resource I know of accomplished that. I can tell you over the years we turned down many vendors selling nothing more than the FCC database on CD."

Hughes says the company even asked him to reconsider his retirement during the Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts -- which likely produced the greatest concentration of emergency radio traffic in recent U.S. history. "I'm getting reports that the books are selling like crazy," he says. "They said, 'Will you print any more?' I said, 'Nope.'"

Of course, at 77, Hughes is allowed to retire -- if that's what you want to call it. He retired from his day job in commercial two-way radio in 1987, but 10 years ago accepted a volunteer assignment as a specialist reserve police officer for the LAPD. He's worked 20 hours a week at the front desk of the department's Wilshire Station ever since.

And when he comes home, he goes to his bank of scanners and tunes in, just as he did 65 years ago -- with some differences. "I make sure that my scanner is picking up the Wilshire Division," he says. "I hear a call go out, and I know everybody now. I say, 'Hey, that's Bailey rolling out on that call.'"

[JohnnyOV 2]

he will be missed. Now i wont be able to get frequencys for my scanner

[x635 4,066]

I remember when my father got me my first scanner at like 8 or 9 years old, I got this book with it. This was before the internet, before the Scanner Master book, a companion to PC of sorts which made understanding the frequencies and what was going on easier, and before I had friends who shared the same interest. With frequencies from this book, I discovered 60 Control, the NYS Thruway Authorities very disciplined operations channel, and many of my other favrorite frequencies. I never realized the history of the book until now, never knew how it grew out of the LA buff culture. I always thought it was just a book sold in Radio Shack.

Despite not having read it in years, I have several older copies, I will miss the memories this book brings. I understand with the advent of the internet, email etc.....this book is becoming obsolete. Additionally, with all the new radio systems coming out, and the internet, I wonder if traditional scanning is becoming obsolete?

[Skooter92 7]

As long as areas keep their antiquated systems in service, we'll have plenty to listen to. Heh, heh.