Re: Not too much ot: Icom Ic-r* scanners


Message posted by lone wolf on July 22, 2006 at 23:48:37 PST:

It doesn't hurt to have a few scanners to monitor Red Flag. You would park one on the awacs (UHF Airband). The second scanner would cover the ground units, which are FM and don't require a mil air scanner (3 or 4 fox frequencies). The third scanner can run on everything else. The AWACS and ground units are so busy that you will probably not hear air to air, refueling, or other activities if you scan those busy frequencies in the same scanner. A 4th scanner would have APCO so that it can scan the Nellis/NTS digital trunk system. Thus far this hasn't been useful in the ranges, though APCO is nice if you are at Nellis AFB itself.

The only Icoms I have are the base units, not the portables, so I can't comment. In the past, the Icom portables had intermod problems due to high sensitivity without a lot of filtering. You can look at red.radio.scanners for comments, or strongsignals.net. Intermod is not going to be a problem in the ranges. Sure there is plenty of radio activity around the ranges, but it is nothing like an urban area.

One of the easy ways to see if a radio will have clean mil air reception is the use of a really high frequency in the first IF, somewhere around 600 to 700Mhz. That scanner will have less birdies. Just about all new scanners are tripple conversion. If you are buying a used scanner, it would be a good idea to check to make sure it's not double conversion.

The base units often have an output for recording. You can always record out of the earphone of a portable, but it required a Y connector and auxillary speaker. Also, many new scanners insert a large resistor in series with earphone output, which screws up recording. They do this so you don't blast your ear with too much volume then sue the manufacturer.

I bought a use Pro-2035 mobile. Good bang for the buck. Note that older scanners need to be programmed by hand, which can be time consuming. The MVT7100 is a nice portable, though tricky to use. It shows up on ebay from time to time.

The nice thing about trunking is people are dumping their old scanners that don't do trunking to get scanners that do trunking. Many of these old scanners have milair.

There are also those black box radios. I don't have any first hand knowledge of them, but some people like them. The Icom PCR series comes to mind. I wouldn't get any radio that has to plug into a PC. Serial port control is fine.


In Reply to: Not too much ot: Icom Ic-r* scanners posted by olowy on July 22, 2006 at 21:32:42 PST:

Replies:



[ Discussion Forum Index ] [ FAQ ]