what does one do with a scanner?

[Greg]

Text (SMS) has a big advantage over every other voice communication method in one very important area: bandwidth. When the towers went down, it took out basically the entire telephone system, but SMS continued to chug along, until it too crashed. It was the last service still running ,and IIRC, the first to start working again.

That was my experience during the aftermath of Katrina.

Sandy, 9/11, etc etc

[308Mike]

MDT?

Mobile Data Terminal

I can only imagine how far they've come since I used them in the 1990's (orange text on black background), great big green SEND button on the upper right corner of the keyboard - they were great back then (especially when someone left their's unlocked and signed on outside the Duty Lieutenant's office while they did research and got their booking approved, you always knew what happened when someone sent a broad message to ALL UNITS asking where the restroom was, etc.).