SCANNER RADIO-The New Cool Stuff

Are you a radio buff? Then Radio Scanner is the right thing for you. It would in fact be the best to have happened to you for a long time. It is an Android-based application that allows you to listen to over 2000 police and fire scanners, weather radio broadcasts and railroad communications, from around the world. The service is provided by volunteers and this is something unique for an application of this sort. With this, you can get a firsthand knowledge of what goes in and around your community.
This is one great application, as you don’t even need to know the frequencies of the scanners you desire to follow, in order to listen to transmissions from all around the country. It gives you a list of the number of listeners following a channel, and what more; it also offers a chat room facility with which you can chat with other users. This tool gives you access to information all around you readily, and satisfies your eagerness, which at many times have to wait till the next day’s papers to get satiated.

It uses your 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi connection to enable you to listen to the transmissions with minimal breaks. It can geo-locate scanners, and this helps you to listen to your local transmissions very readily. Another great feature of this application is that it can alert the user when an already specified channel reaches a user-configured number of listeners. This helps you in knowing the “hot-news” of the day almost instantly. It also provides details of the frequencies followed on each of the channels. Another interesting feature about this application is it ability to put it to sleep, after listening to a user-specified amount of time. You can also pause, rewind or fast-forward the transmission once it starts streaming.
The standard application is free, though a paid version (Pro Version- $2.49) is also available which gives a more comprehensive list of scanners, and a very clear transmission. It also enables you to get rid of the advertisements and you can activate player control on widgets. It, rather than a usual paid-version of an application, doesn’t exactly have premium features, acts like a key to unlock various, desirable and slight changes to the settings.
The one big disadvantage for this is the limited number of channels available, as these feeds are volunteer driven. Another major minus is the reliability factor of the channels, as only some of them are very reliable, while the other though listed may not work at all.
On the whole, this is a great application for all the radio-buffs out there. A must have, and an interestingly different application, I should say.

Pros:

Listen in on police/fire radio calls
Scanners available around the world
Can run in the background without interference

Cons:

Not all areas are supported, but this is an issue with lack of volunteers providing audio from their own scanner