If you are watching a channel/frequency for activity but don't want to physically sit and listen, this can be helpful. It's a hack and slash of my "simplex repeater" script to simplify for use as a "record and loop" method.

I like leaving it running at night and waking up to "news" of things that happened for #police / #fire / #EMS / etc when I wake up.

Since it's a simple script, you can modify it to alert you via text (there are services that let you SMS from curl commands) or email you the recordings or any number of other things... Several old scanners and several USB soundcards could let you also tag the files with channel/frequency names... /shrug