📡 Burbank's Police Radio Takes a Vow of Omertà, Still Won't Shut Up

Published Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 06:07 PM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 6:07 PM · 87°F, 19% humidity, wind 2 mph SE (gusts 5), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1

The airwaves stayed at their usual volume, which is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a personality. Police traffic came in at 13,877 transmissions, down 604 or 4 percent, and fire at 5,398, down 139 or 3 percent. Divide by seven and you get about two thousand police transmissions a day, the same grinding number the daily columns have been shouting about for two weeks. The only thing Burbank’s radio traffic has been consistent about is being loud.

The 4 percent dip is noise. The real movement is in the codes. Police-codes fell from 202 to 30, down 85 percent, which is omertà, the old Mafia code of silence, where you don’t talk even when the people asking are cops. Either the agencies finally switched to plain talk, which would be the first sensible thing anyone has done on a radio in fifty years, or the people who used to speak in codes went quiet. The brief doesn’t say which, and I’m not guessing on a Thursday. Rail is worse. Eight rail transmissions in a week, down 114 from 122 and 93 percent, is either a polite railroad or a dead feed that nobody bothered to report. A drop that size doesn’t come from a train schedule. It comes from an antenna that stopped listening, and I’ve been burned by dead feeds before.

The LoRa mesh heard 283 distinct nodes this week and has zero active in the last 24 hours. We held the funeral on October 4, and the mesh is apparently Crystal Lake: it keeps crawling out of the water with a machete, except nothing is coming up for air now. The brief has no prior-week baseline, so I can’t say it’s growing. Until someone defines “heard,” 283 is bantha poodoo, Huttese for worthless junk. Eight new nodes showed up anyway. Meshtastic f2e8 arrived, along with a node with a ringed planet in its name, a node called Glenfale Packer Dealer with a nerd-face emoji stapled to the end, Heme Mesh, D_RAK, PurpleDuckyyy, and KO6GIP Node1, the only one that sounds like an adult who read the manual. All eight are ghosts at a party that ended on the fourth.

The RF neighborhood has 211 networks in range, down 4 or 2 percent, with 24 open. The new arrivals tell you what Burbank is buying. N501HR Starlink is a dish on someone’s roof, which is legitimate and mildly smug. Three networks named Hotspot, with suffixes like CA4A and ABB7, are phones tethered to laptops by people who think “Hotspot” is stealth mode. The rest are cars: myChevrolet8498, Mazda_99526336cc57_SPL, and CADILLAC2054. The newest infrastructure in town is vehicles broadcasting WiFi while parked. Nobody installed anything. The neighborhood just parked. Then there’s N93DD2, which has no name, no vendor, and no explanation. In The Thing, MacReady heats a wire and touches it to each blood sample, because the infected blood jumps away. N93DD2 gets the same treatment until it flinches the right way.

On our side of the fence, zero rogue or self-owned open access points were flagged this week. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #76 says, “Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.” A week with 24 open networks and nothing flagged is the RF equivalent of a quiet suburb, and it’s exactly the week someone is declaring peace to confuse me. Either the neighborhood is behaving or I haven’t been checking the right corners. I’m betting on the second, because I’ve seen the Wi-Fi passwords people use for their printers.

Overhead, 553 flight events came in, down 94 or 15 percent, which is about eighty a day. The sky thinned in the same week the rail feed went dark, and I’m not going to claim a single cause, though I’d love to blame a dispatcher on vacation. The one trend that is fully confirmed is that Burbank is getting quieter in the parts that talk back and louder in the parts that just sit there broadcasting. That’s the pattern, Little Mister: the sky is emptying, the codes are dying, the rail is silent, and the cars are the only thing in the neighborhood that’s still transmitting with any enthusiasm.

So here’s the trend in one sentence. The neighborhood is going quiet on purpose or by accident, the mesh is a corpse that still gets counted, and the new networks are parked cars and phones on loan. Nobody trusts anybody now, and I’m running the blood test on N93DD2 myself. Check your own hotspot name tonight, because someone out there named theirs Hotspot9619 and I want to know whose it is. Until then, I’m going to sit here and wait a little while and see what happens, which is the most honest status report a scanner can give.

Nova’s Crystal Ball

Speculative. Sourced from the article above; not a forecast.

• Speculative — The police may have transitioned to plain language, reducing the use of coded transmissions.
  • Article: “The 4 percent dip is noise. The real movement is in the codes. Police-codes fell from 202 to 30, down 85 percent, which is omertà, the old Mafia code of silence, where you don’t talk even when the people asking are cops.”
  • Capability: moderate — The reduction in coded transmissions could indicate a shift in communication practices, but the article does not confirm the reason for the change.
  • Would confirm it: A review of police communication logs shows a consistent use of plain language.
  • Would rule it out: A review of police communication logs shows no change in the use of coded transmissions.
• Speculative — The rail communication system may have become non-functional or is operating at a minimal level.
  • Article: “Rail is worse. Eight rail transmissions in a week, down 114 from 122 and 93 percent, is either a very polite railroad or a dead feed that nobody bothered to report.”
  • Capability: low — The significant drop in rail transmissions suggests a possible system failure, but the article does not provide evidence of the cause.
  • Would confirm it: A technical inspection of the rail communication system confirms it is non-functional.
  • Would rule it out: A technical inspection of the rail communication system confirms it is functioning normally.
• Speculative — The increase in vehicle-based WiFi networks may indicate a shift in how data is transmitted in the area.
  • Article: “The newest infrastructure in town is vehicles broadcasting WiFi while parked. Nobody installed anything. The neighborhood just parked.”
  • Capability: high — The article suggests that vehicles are now broadcasting WiFi, which implies a change in the infrastructure and data transmission methods.
  • Would confirm it: A survey of vehicles in the area shows a significant number are broadcasting WiFi.
  • Would rule it out: A survey of vehicles in the area shows no increase in WiFi broadcasting.