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Reno calls itself the Biggest Little City in the World, and the nickname describes its radio traffic as well as anything else about it. Reno and Sparks are separate cities with separate police departments, but they've grown together into one continuous urban strip along the Truckee River, with close to half a million people packed into the high desert valley they share, the Truckee Meadows. For a listener, that density is a gift. Where a sprawling metro scatters its radio traffic across dozens of channels, the Truckee Meadows concentrates it, and a single combined feed can carry most of what happens between the foothills on a given night, from a disturbance call on the casino corridor to a wreck at the Spaghetti Bowl, the interchange where I-80 meets US 395. This is that feed:
Reno and Sparks Police and Fire
Washoe County, Nevada
Begin by downloading Scanner Radio, a free app that streams live police, fire, and EMS radio straight to your phone. Once it's installed, tap the button above to open the Reno and Sparks Police and Fire feed and you'll be hearing the valley's dispatch traffic in seconds.
To hear the rest of the region, search "Nevada" in the app. North of town there's Pyramid Lake Fire, covering the tribal lands around the lake the Truckee River empties into. Thirty miles south, the Carson City Sheriff feed carries law enforcement traffic for Nevada's capital, and the Douglas County Sheriff and Fire feed reaches the Carson Valley and Tahoe's Nevada shore. To the east, Lyon County Sheriff and Fire Dispatch covers the commuter towns of Fernley and Dayton. No hardware, antenna, or setup required. Just the app and a few seconds to tap into a channel.
A combined police and fire channel gives you the whole texture of a city at once. On the police side that means traffic stops, foot patrols working the downtown core, and the steady procession of welfare checks, alarm activations, and minor collisions that fill an ordinary shift. On the fire side you'll hear medical aid calls, vehicle fires, and, from midsummer into fall, brush fires on the sage-covered hillsides that ring the valley, the kind of call that can escalate from a single engine to a full wildland response while you listen. Big weekends add their own layer: the Reno Rodeo, Hot August Nights, and the late August stream of Burning Man travelers headed for the Black Rock Desert all put extra crowds, and extra calls, on the air. Winter flips the script: chain controls, spinouts on 395 toward Mount Rose, and storm traffic coming down out of the Sierra. If the codes and clipped phrasing are hard to follow at first, our guide to scanner codes will get you fluent, and if you're curious why scanner listeners often know about an incident before it's reported anywhere else, we've written about how news breaks on scanners.
You can listen to Reno and Sparks police and fire radio using the Scanner Radio app.
Yes. Listening to publicly broadcast scanner traffic is legal in Nevada and across the United States. Restrictions only apply to using a scanner while committing a crime.
No. With the Scanner Radio app, you can listen to Reno and Sparks police and fire traffic straight from your phone. There is no hardware, antenna, or setup required.
The Reno and Sparks Police and Fire feed is the natural first stop. It carries dispatch traffic for both cities on one channel, so most incidents in the Truckee Meadows surface there first.
It carries police and fire radio traffic for the cities of Reno and Sparks in Washoe County, Nevada, the two cities that make up the core of the Truckee Meadows.
Listening from somewhere else? Swipe through our other city guides.
