I have a Radio Shack Pro-2018 scanner, and I was wondering if, and how I could pick up radio stations on it.
Where could I find a list of of conversions? Or is it simple, like if I want 107.7 then I put 107,700 in my scanner?
You want to listen to an FM broadcast station (like KABC hits 95)?
Forget it unless the scanner was specifically designed for this (I’ve not seen one that was). Why?
A police scanner is meant (primarily) to receive FM signals with a 5 KHz deviation, some (especially older ones) will accept up to a 15 KHz deviation. Anything more and the discriminator (the circuit that retrieves the audio from the signal) will clip and distort.
An FM broadcast station uses a 75 KHz deviation, impossible to receive on the scanner because it saturates the detector causing clipping and distortion, also the filter in the scanner would not pass the signal thru when it was being modulated because it would be constantly going outside the passband of the filter.
It would be the equivalent of turning your hearing aid up all the way and then standing directly in front of the speaker at a rock concert. It is sure to be loud but so distorted you wont understand a thing.
No harm in trying I suppose. Instead of programming in something like 155.805 for the local PD, you would put in 105.700 for FM 105.7 but I’ll bet that the scanner will return an error if you do.