[Jeffhs]

Regency was a very good make of radios and even UHF television converters, but not TV sets themselves, in the '50s. Their model TR-1, introduced in 1954, was the first all-transistor radio to be manufactured and sold in this country. Their police band monitors were popular in the '50s as well. The company was based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Regency's first VHF receivers were tunable with several switchable crystal-controlled channels, but they also had a line of automatic scanning receivers for VHF public service bands in the late '60s or seventies (crystal controlled; the company wasn't around long enough to see today's synthesized scanners).

They also had at least one scanning amateur radio transceiver (for 2 meters--146-148 MHz), which came out, IIRC, in the late '60s or early '70s. I am an amateur radio operator and saw several of these units advertised in ham publications of that era; I also once talked with an old-time ham who had a Regency base-station FM scanner transceiver (the first one of these I had ever heard of at the time). From what he told me, he liked the unit and used it for many years.

CELT, you are lucky to be living in an area where the police and fire departments are still using VHF communications systems, as most police/fire divisions in major cities (and even smaller towns, such as where I live) have converted to UHF (470-512 MHz). The public-transportation system in my small town has such a UHF communications system using hand-carried portables, IIRC; it would not surprise me if the local police and fire department's radio systems are now UHF as well.

However, I once read in an issue of Popular Electronics magazine from the mid-'60s of a way one could convert a low-band public-service receiver to receive the then-new UHF police band. The conversion involved the use of an old UHF television converter such as Blonder-Tongue's BT-99, et al.; I don't recall what modifications to the converter were required, but the important thing is the dodge worked. It was a cheap and dirty way to eavesdrop on your local police and fire departments if they had converted all their communications networks to UHF and you didn't want to go out and get a UHF police receiver (which were fairly rare in the '60s anyhow).

If you have an older TV set with a continuous UHF tuner (including varactor tuners with individually presettable channel positions) and you live in an area where the public service divisions all have UHF communications systems, you may be able to hear their transmissions between channels 14 and roughly 18 or 19. (You can also hear cellular telephone transmissions between channels 70 and 83.)

However, if you do monitor police transmissions or cellular telephone gab this way, bear in mind that it is strictly illegal to repeat to anyone what you hear. In the case of police and fire communications, these are not supposed to be overheard, but they are often eavesdropped on nevertheless because of the nature of continuous UHF TV tuners (which tune slightly above and below the UHF TV band, not to mention being able to tune 470-512 MHz directly as part of their intended tuning range) and, of course, receivers designed to tune these bands.

As far as cellular telephone talk goes, all new scanners which tune anywhere near 830-850 MHz are required by the FCC to be cellular blocked, i. e. made unable to receive transmissions in the part of the band allocated to cellular telephone services. In other words, if you purchase a new scanner receiver which has a tuning range of, for example, 0.5 to 2300 MHz, please be aware that there will be a gap in the coverage right around 830-850 MHz or thereabouts. This is to deter eavesdropping on cell phone conversations, and also why new TV sets' UHF coverage stops at channel 69 (channels 70 through 83 were reassigned to other services in 1970, decades before cell phones as we know them today became popular).

mhardy6647, I wouldn't worry about your post being off-topic here. The Regency Monitoradio series is probably just old enough now to be considered vintage, if not outright antique. The sets were made in the '50s through the '60s; the lettering on the dial scale is a dead giveaway to '50s vintage, as the "megacycles" designation at the right end of the scale is in large lowercase letters, as was popular in that era. Also, the use of the term "megacycles" rather than "megahertz" on the dials to designate frequency range tells us the radios were made before 1967 (the year the official switchover from megacycles to megahertz took place).