Lubbock scanner glossary

If you have just started listening to the Lubbock feed, most of the confusion comes from callsigns and status phrases. Here is what the words on this site mean, and which ones you will actually hear in this city.

Fire and EMS callsigns

Fire apparatus are named for what the vehicle is and which station it runs from, so the number is a station number rather than a priority. Across the American fire service the pattern is consistent:

• Engine is a pumper. It carries hose, water and a crew, and it is the workhorse that shows up to almost everything, including medical calls.
• Truck or Ladder is the aerial. It brings ladders, forcible entry tools and roof work.
• Rescue handles extrication and technical rescue, and in many systems also runs medical calls.
• Battalion is a chief officer who takes command when several units are working the same incident. Hearing a battalion assigned is a good sign the call is a real one.
• Tanker hauls water where hydrants are thin, which in Lubbock means the edges of the city and the county.

Police callsigns

Patrol units combine numbers with a phonetic letter, so what you hear as "31-15" or "2-Adam-14" encodes a district, a shift and a unit rather than anything about the call. You will also hear DPS, the Texas Department of Public Safety, whose troopers work the highways and the Loop, and occasionally the Sheriff's Office on calls outside the city limits.

Status words you will hear

These are the four states this site tracks for every unit, and they are the ones dispatchers use: dispatched (assigned, not moving yet), en route (rolling), on scene (arrived), and clear or available (finished and back in service). "Show me out at" is a unit telling dispatch where it is stopping. "Disregard" or "cancel" means the call is being dropped, often because a second caller cleared it up or the first unit found nothing.

Phrases that mean something specific

• Signal 1 traffic, or emergency traffic: a unit is asking everyone else to stay off the channel.
• Code 3: lights and siren.
• Start a second: dispatch is adding another unit or another ambulance.
• Upgrade / downgrade: the response is being made more or less urgent as better information arrives. A downgrade usually means the emergency turned out to be smaller than the first report.
• Call complete or in service: the incident is over for that unit.

Callsigns heard most in the last 30 days

Straight from our own data: the units attached to the most incidents on this site over the last month. Frequency here reflects what comes through the feed clearly, so treat it as a listening guide rather than a workload ranking.

Words this site uses

• Unconfirmed: the radio traffic never clearly confirmed what was found. Most incidents that stay unconfirmed are ordinary calls with rough audio, not cover-ups.
• Human verified: a person read the audio or the text and corrected it by hand.
• Possibly inaccurate: a person has flagged the report while it is being checked.
• Closed: no new radio traffic for a while, so the incident is considered finished.

More on where these labels come from in how it works.