Hello I have a Baofeng UV-5R that I want to program as a police scanner I need step by step help of how to program it please help
In short, you can’t.
The Baofeng UV-5R is an amateur two-way radio. It is not designed or intended to act as a receive-only scanner.
Even if you knew the exact frequency of the police agencies in your area, it is highly unlikely a ham radio would be able to receive those frequencies. Most public service agencies in North America have now gone to digital radios, many of them in the 800MHz and 900MHz bands. Agencies that have not switched to digital yet, will be soon.
The other issue is that most police agencies and EMS (and some fire) are now encrypted, meaning that they cannot be monitored by anyone without the proper radio and encryption code.
The hobby of listening to police broadcasts is now pretty much dead. Sorry.
As a matter of fact, I have the local emergency services programmed in my UV-5R (155Mhz range). Works well enough. I don’t remember ‘opening up’ the thing so figure this is common…
To W5LZ…I am not aging any luck putting in my local police, fire , highway frequencies to listen to.
I need to be able to scan them on one channel I believe. When I follow all directions and it says hit “scan” for 2 seconds to go to “range” all it does is scan. I also need to know how to get rid of preprogrammed frequencies. Just need step by step …thank you
The UV-5R is terrible as a scanner. It scans at about 3 channels per second which might sound fast but trust me it’s not. I own 4 UV-5R’s and several old Realistic analog scanners and decided against the scan function the first time I tried it. Instead I use the 5R’s to monitor the dispatch frequencies and use the much more performant scanners to scan the tactical channels.
Anyway… Use the simplex programming instructions here to program your local analog police frequencies https://w7apk.com/baofeng and/or print out the cheat sheet http://www.multnomahares.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/BAOFENG-UV-5R-MJS-2.pdf
After that’s done, make sure your’e in memory mode (use the orange VFO/MR button to switch modes) and hold down the */SCAN button until scanning starts.