And now a little on the current line of digital scanners....
GRE has been busy lately. They are currently preparing for the release of 4 new scanners. They are the PSR300 and PSR400 Analog Scanners, and the PSR500 and PSR 600. The 500 and 600 are the new APCO-25 Digital Scanners. To see each of these and others, go to the Radio Reference WIKI page. Click this link here to view the new scanners at GRE AMERICA'S website.More information as it is released. Street date is in October 2007. Pre-Order yours today from these fine establishments:
The Ham Station ***Grove Enterprises
GRE
Support Desk
Your GRE America Source for DSP firmware and CPU Firmware
There are 4 APCO-25 Digital 3600/9600 baud scanners on the market and currently in use by thousands of users. Radio Shack/GRE has two, and Uniden has two. We will discuss these four scanners in detail and hopefully make your choice a bit easier on which one to purchase, or if you already have one of these scanners, then maybe this short review will help you out. First we will discuss the Radio Shack/GRE scanners:
These two scanners are in the opionion of MTT the easiest of scanners to use. Let us explain why. 1) Out of the box, all that is needed is a Control Channel and the bank set to Motorola. Then your off scanning. 2) Digital AGC- unlike the Unidens, the Radio Shack/GRE line of scanners has this function only on the digtial side. What this does is allow the audio to be the same all across the board. There are no flucuations in the audio and it sounds great. 3) These two scanners are very easy to program- even if you are programming by hand, hands down they are by far the easiest to program. Michigan Trunk Tracking recommends if are a beginner in this hobby to grab one of these scanners. Even if you are an experienced user, these scanners are top shelf quality.
These two scanners are advanced scanners. These scanners and not for beginners in our opionion. Looks are very deceiving. Let us again explain why: 1) These scanners and not easily programmed by hand. We recently had a chance to review the BC997T and we ended up purchasing BuTel Softare just to program it. 2) Digital and Analog AGC- while it works, it is not the best, and uniden is still on the bottom when it comes to AGC.3)These radios operate just like a radio does from the MPSCS(Michigan Public Safety Communication System) The scanner was designed for folks that travel and does a great job of bouncing from Tower site to Tower site. Unless you have software, you are going to be up creek without a paddle when programming. 4) Looks can be deceiving- The scanners have huge displays, and are bigger than the Radio Shack/GRE line. Bigger is not always better. In our opionion, even if you are an advanced radio listener, make sure that you are ready to tackle these radios. They are good scanners, but not meant for the beginner.
