I get up at 6am every morning. I really have no choice - my dog sets this schedule for me. I usually have a cup of coffee and work on my computer for a while, or read a book. This morning I was sitting at my desk working on my computer when I snatched a glance out the window and noticed that it had become particularly foggy. It’s been hot as hell and all the windows were closed and the air conditioner was on. We had just watched a special on the local News12 yesterday about the ‘Sunrise Fire’ 10 years ago and Cathy, who was also up by then, said "…better check that it’s not smoke!". So I got up and strode out onto the back steps. One whiff was enough to get me dialing 911.The police operator switched me over to Fire, and I calmly gave the county dispatcher my location and explained the situation. The smoke was thick now, blown North through the woods by a morning ‘on-shore’ breeze off the ocean. Cathy was getting the kids out of bed, dressed, and putting together important papers. Strange that we had just discussed putting together all the important stuff the night before (and hadn’t gotten to it) in anticipation of a possible visit by the now happily departing hurricane Irene.

Thankfully, as it turned out, there was a car fire around the corner which the Fire Dept. was already responding to and it was under control.

Unfortunately, when I grabbed my trusty old PRO-64 scanner, which is programmed with about 300 frequencies for any and all emergency transmissions, it wasn’t picking anything up. I thought for sure I’d catch some traffic on the car fire, if only a Signal 5 (returning to station) when the fire was out, but switching the thing to different bands, I wasn’t picking up a thing. The county trunk system on the 860MHz band, normally a call a second was quiet, and I couldn’t even get the NOAA weather channels. Something was wrong!

Confident that we weren’t being invaded by aliens, and satisfied that there wasn’t any crazy sunspot activity by checking a couple sites on the internet, it comes back to my radio. I’m pretty bummed about it, since I really enjoy listening to the scanner once in a while but it appears the kids have dropped it one too many times.

I checked out a couple of new ones, including the PRO-97 but with the recent expenditures for the car, it’s not in the cards anytime soon. The radio frequencies around here are silent.