Message posted by lone wolf on March 25, 2004 at 19:53:04 PST:

Just to clear things up, the 2052 gets both VHF and UHF air. The 2052 is a mobile, and the other scanners discussed thus far are portables (aka handheld).

The BC250D is nice, but it has two strikes against it. One is the Uniden battery pack. Uniden insists on using this really crappy battery pack scheme rather than use AA cells like everyone else. With AA cells, you can use either alkalines, nicads, or NiMH. [I don't use NiMH, but that is another story.] If you camp out in the desert, it sure is hard to charge those Uniden packs. The other thing not in favor of the 250D is it is more or less replaced by the 296, which does more modes of trunking and is the same price if you include the astro decoder card. The 250Ds you see on Ebay are probably from 296 upgrades.

I got a used Pro-96 from someone who wanted to go with the Uniden 296. [There are subtle ways each scanner handles the talk goups, and some prefer the Uniden method over Radio Shack. There are advantages to the Uniden PC control as well, but this is getting off topic. Note that on digital decode, the sound quality of the Pro-96 is much better than on Uniden scanner.) With the software from starrsoft.com, the Pro-96 is mil air capable and of course PC programable. The pro-96 used AA cells. Full alphanumerics too. Of course, I do the recording on the MVT7100 when possible. The sound quality is much better.

I should point out that all military bases now have trunk radio systems, so having a scanner with trunking capability is not a bad idea, but you have to pay more for that feature. Check out the trunk radio website link. Incidentally, the info on the Nellis trunk system is wrong. Also, there seems to be no consistency between systems at military bases. Nellis is EDACS, Edwards is Motorola analog, Travis is Motorola Astro, etc. Anyway, every trunk system at a military base is unique, and this makes determining the control parameters a non-trivial task. Once somebody figures it out, then scanning the systems are quite straightforward.

Talk Group 176 at Edwards looks like it will be quite useful. They more or less anounce what they are about to launch or recover on that TG. If you hear "marine helicopter", look for the Ospry.

One last thing. While scanning the range control on my last visit, I heard 148.5 referred to as Fox 4 analog. I suspect the range control is going to go digital trunked at some point.

In Reply to: I reccomend the pro 2052 by radio shack or the bc 250d posted by Aaron Johnson on March 25, 2004 at 19:12:52 PST:

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