Using an eTrex Legend for Location Control of a Police Scanner

My eTrex Legend had been mothballed for some years after I bought a Magellan to display color topo maps. Last year I bought a new Uniden police/fire/EMS scanner. It has the capability to control what systems are scanned based upon your position, and has a serial USB data input port. I found that my eTrex could export data in an NMEA serial format that the scanner could recognize, so I bought a couple of cables. One is an eTrex-to-DB9 cable that, unlike the one supplied with the eTrex, brings out the external power pin letting me run the eTrex from external power in my Explorer. The other is a cable that connects to the scanner data port - I replaced the USB connector on that cable with a DB9 to mate with the eTrex cable. I mounted a long-unused cell phone holder on the dashboard to hold the eTrex, connected it to power and the scanner, and it works great. Business and pleasure sometimes take me through a number of jurisdictions and sometimes through 2 or 3 state police divisions, and the GPS data from the eTrex insures that I am always listening only to local traffic on the scanner - an excellent re-purposing of my oldest GPS unit.

 

Mine is a current model BCD436HP (portable), and it would also work with the BCD536HP (base/mobile) and the newest models SDS100 (portable) and SDS200 (base/mobile) which use a software defined radio core.