And you know, looking back on it today, in retrospect, it's funny and borderline hypocritical how in the late 80s/early 90s, the telecoms made so much static about 800 MHz radios that could tune the AMPS bands being this terrible social ill that absolutely had to be eradicated by any means necessary, even if that meant enacting arbitrary and unenforceable legislation barring one from tuning certain frequencies and mandating technical provisions for such. Yet nobody (back then, anyways) ever seemed to say anything about IMTS, 45/49 MHz cordless phones and paging, which were just as wide open and of which receivers were far more widely available.
We still had a 150 MHz IMTS channel opearting here (JP or YP, IIRC) into the mid-2000s until Qwest finally yanked the plug. I got my first scanner around 1996 or so, and over those 10 or so years I only heard people on it maybe three or four times. Last time I heard it, I happened upon a guy talking to somebody testing an old phone that was his dad's. I never heard anybody else after that, and I think they shut it down a few months later.
I acquired a PRO-2004 around 2013 or so at Salvation Army; stock, of course, that I did the obligatory diode clip-out procedure on, just so I could say I did it. Unlike my high-school years when I got my PRO-2005, by that point AMPS in this part of LATA 672 was long gone though there was that one private (?) system that I believe I mentioned some time ago, which last I checked is also probably gone. (I know I talked about it in passing here:
» Analog Cellular Phone Calls 1988 The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Homepage: No News, No Sports, Just the Weather…man) I think I still have that scanner, it's probably buried in the corner of my mom's basement along with my school cable modulator and some of my other old comms/audio/motocross equipment. Ironically, these days a "blocked" 800 MHz section, which was once an injustice, is now a convenience since it relieves the user and his thumb of constant button pressing when in search mode to skip through hundreds of channels of data hash noise.