[Scan-DC] Canadian scanner listener

[Alan Henney]

Canwest News Service

March 24, 2012 Saturday 10:00 PM EST 

Eliminating the middleman in the information revolution; Rob Duerr gets his information about crime in Edmonton direct, unfiltered and unexpurgated - from his bank of high-tech police scanners

BYLINE: Rick McConnell, edmontonjournal.com

LENGTH: 854 words

EDMONTON - While the multitudes muddle along with traditional information sources (newspapers, television, radio stations, or their dot-com equivalents), while the rest of us cop that next fix from the billion-brained beasts of Facebook and Twitter, the few, the proud, the very, very skeptical prefer to get their news in a somewhat less-conventional way.

By eavesdropping on the cops. 

Rob Duerr earns his daily bread repairing and installing CB and Ham radios for trucking companies, by programming police scanners for local newsrooms in search of, well, the news. He then goes home and, you guessed it, listens to police scanners or talks on his ham radio with other guys who, often as not, also listen to police scanners.

This guy is tuned in, turned on and plugged in. All day, every day.

He wakes up to the squawk of the scanner on his bedside table. He carries an $825 hand-held everywhere he goes. He drifts off to sleep, sometimes very late at night, with the background buzz of police chatter in his ear.

Listening to city police, the RCMP, ambulance crews and firefighters is Duerr's hobby, his almost all-consuming passion.

"It's good entertainment," he says.

His live-in partner, Denise Bysterveld, has, over the past three years, come to share his intense interest in all those "Charlie, Oscar, Papa" codes, all those 10-24s and 10-42s. These two 10-99s (unauthorized listeners, in city police lingo) can't take a 10-99 (RCMP code for a coffee break) without knowing the outcome of the latest 10-whatever-it-is that has captured their ears, and their imaginations.

Duerr takes a scanner along when he goes fishing. On camping trips, the scanner gets packed along with the sleeping bags, and they'll listen to Boyle RCMP calls, if that's all they can pull in.

Not long ago, Duerr found himself listening to city crews cleaning the streets outside their apartment. He can talk VHF and UHF, watts and megahertz and wave propagation until your head spins.

Bysterveld, who works as a nursing attendant, had trouble, at first, sleeping through all the noise. Now she can't sleep when it's quiet.

"There's times when I stay awake to find out if they caught the bad guys," she says.

Last weekend, she was captivated by a little drama that played out on the scanners, as the police helicopter and several cruisers searched for a missing autistic teenager.

"I don't know if they ever found the poor little guy," she says.

In the hot and cluttered living room of their apartment on 118th Avenue, there is shelving unit filled with gizmos and gadgets. The main police scanner sits above the Yaesu FT-77 radio transceiver, which sits above the newer-model Yaesu AT-897 radio transceiver, which sits next to another electronic thingamajig they never got around to explaining.

"On these, I can talk to people all over the world," Duerr says of the transceivers.

The sophisticated setup is hitched up to seven antennas on the balcony, and powered by a big black box on the bottom shelf.

Duerr started listening to scanners when he was about 12. "I saw them on TV and thought, 'this is cool, I've got to do this,' " he says.

The Burt Reynolds Smokey and the Bandit movies in the 1970s made CB radios cool for a time. Nowadays, not so much. There used to be scanner clubs in the city, but those have fallen away; he and his friends now get together over coffee to talk about all this stuff.

Over the years, Duerr tried his hand at various jobs. He was a chef, a mechanic, he worked in the floor-covering business and in construction. Eventually, he found his place at CB City in Sherwood Park, where he has worked for years.

He turned 49 a week ago and has built himself a comfortable, do-it-yourself world where information arrives unfiltered and unexpurgated. But that kind of instant access, that constant attention to all things great and small, may come at a price. If you monitor every fire and ambulance call, every police dispatch, you're bound to see the world as a darker, more dangerous place. Recent statistics say crime rates are dropping. But Duerr insists his ears tell him that's not true.

"You never get the full truth" from the media," says Duerr, who has grey in his scruffy beard, wears glasses and has the constant bemused smile of a man who knows things the rest of us don't. "But you can hear it on the scanner and you know exactly what went on. I'm listening to it as it happens, as they're talking about it. I know what really went on."

In a way, Duerr is like a modern-day Diogenes in search of one honest man, or at least the honest truth, as he hears it. The metaphor scans, if you will, because Duerr also happens to collect antique oil lamps. The couple has about two dozen. The oldest dates from 1854. The most valuable is a Civil War-era desk lamp he bought on EBay for $80.

These days, when he's not listening to the cacophonous sounds of life in the 21st century, Duerr is learning all he can about hand-blown glass and Eagle-brand burners, the relics of a simpler, no doubt much quieter, time.

If you know someone interesting, someone you think we should write about, please email me at: rmcconnell at edmontonjournal.com