Is listening to a police-scanner channel online, representative of actual communication?

Factual Questions
1

Sitting here listening to the local county police/fire department scanner channel online, and although I have decent hearing skills - and average Dell speakers - I can only understand about 30% of what is being said.

Is this typical for an actual police/fire radio as well? If so, it’s a good thing I never went into that line of work - I’d constantly be having to say “please repeat that last transmission, and talk slower this time (oh, and don’t release the button until you’re done talking)”. :smack:

2

The audio quality you hear online is highly dependent on the actual scanner/radio hardware being used to receive the stream and get it into a computer, as well as the amount of compression used to transmit it online.

A poor receiver and low-bitrate MP3 compression, together, are what make most of those streams unintelligible.

While it differs between brands, police radios in actual use usually have pretty good audio quality.

3

plus, once you know the jargon, you can understand more of what is said,