In order to help residents stay tuned to the latest events in the Wake Forest area we are bringing you the Wake Forest News live scanner so you can hear events as they happen.

Using the player below you can listen to events as they happen using your computer or smartphone.

You will be able to listen to emergency responders around the Wake Forest area. These include:

• Wake Forest Police Department
• Wake County Fire Department
• Wake EMS
• Wake County Sheriff’s Office NE Sector
• North Carolina State Highway Patrol Troop C
• Raleigh Police Department NE Sector
• Rolesville PD
• Franklin County Fire Department
• Franklin County EMS
• Franklin County Law Enforcement
• WRAL Helicopter
• WTVD Helicopter
• Weather Emergency Warnings: flood, high wind, tornado, severe thunderstorm, and winter storm.

If you’ve never listened to emergency radio traffic before you will need to keep in mind there may be gaps in communications where nothing is happening or if all the emergency responders go to lunch at the same time. Just be patient, they’ll be back.

The audio should start automatically when you land on this page. If you don’t hear an introductory message, push the play button below.

FAQs

Q: My browser says “no source found,” is the player on the Wake Forest News site broken?
A: We bet you may be using Internet Explorer version 7 or 8. People have reported a problem with these older versions of Internet Explorer browsers. May we suggest a more reliable free alternative browser like Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Q: Is radio traffic in the Wake Forest area just need a simple scanner to hear it?
A: We wish it was that simple. Most local radio traffic uses a sophisticated trunking radio network. You’d have to read the description below to really understand how it works.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Trunking Networks

In the Wake County area most emergency responder traffic is broadcast over the North Carolina Viper network. This network relies upon a statewide network of transmitter towers and repeaters. By connecting to the nearest tower an emergency responder can communicate with their office from any place in the state as long as that local repeater has been added to their radio.

VIPER utilizes the 800MHz frequency range and is a fairly complex setup that requires specialized radios and scanners to access.

For those who want a more technical look at how trunking works this description will help to fill in the gaps.

The trunking radio, in a patrol car for example, is much more sophisticated than the simple transceiver previously used in a simplex or repeater configuration. A trunking transceiver is a microprocessor-controlled radio capable of receiving instructions from the system controller and changing frequencies on the fly. All trunked radios operate in a similar manner although the type of trunking technology used by each type of trunked radio system differs greatly.

In the trunked radio environment, each agency is assigned one or more talkgroups that the agency’s communications will use. All agencies on the system will have different talkgroups but all will share the same pool of frequencies.

To help explain how it works, here an example of a control channel-based type of trunked radio system. (Some trunking systems don’t use a dedicated control channel.) In this type of system, all the radios on the system (except the computer controlled set of repeaters, of course) listen to a common control channel (CCh) output frequency and transmit (initially) on a common control channel input frequency, unless they are listening to a conversation on a talkgroup.

Let’s say that Police Officer Jeff (from the Wake Forest Police Department) wants to tell the dispatch office that he is now in service. The following actions take place in a very short time–much less time than it takes you to read this.

• When Police Officer Jeff picks up his microphone and keys the mike, his radio sends a signal on the CCh input frequency, which the controlling computer understands as a request for a channel grant for the talkgroup assigned to Wake Forest Police.
• His radio then instantly goes back into receive mode, while he’s still holding down the push-to-talk switch. The computer looks at the system for an empty channel pair and issues that channel grant on a specific channel pair and sends that channel grant information out on the CCh output channel. This channel grant information tells all radios on the system: “if you are listening (monitoring) for communications on the Wake Forest Police talkgroup: change to channel pair XX on the system for a communication”.
• All radios tuned to the Wake Forest Police talkgroup, including Police Officer Jeff’s, then switch frequencies to that channel pair granted by the computer.
• Police Officer Jeff’s radio, after changing frequencies, goes into transmit mode and he can start to talk. Generally, the radio will generate a “talk-permit tone” to tell him that it has tuned to a channel, and is now in transmit mode.* As he talks, all the radios monitoring the Wake Forest Police talkgroup are now listening on the assigned repeater output channel and are ready to talk on the assigned repeater input channel. This continues until Police Officer Jeff has finished his transmission. On some types of systems, further communication may be on the initially assigned channel pair or it may move to another, but the process stays the same. – Source