Shortwave and Scanners Vs Wideband Recivers

[LlamaZorz]

If you need a shortwave radio to listen to HF and a Scanner to listen to UHF and VHF, why not just get one Wideband Receiver which has a much greater range at a similar price.

[trixwagen]

This sounds like a troll, but I'll bite.

A wideband receiver is a jack of all trades and master of none, unless you get professional level or semi-professional level ($$$$) receiver.

In my experience, most wideband receivers, especially the hand held ones, have worse HF sensitivity than the cheapest Chinese shortwave radio. And one antenna is not going to be optimal for every band the wideband receiver can receive.

Also, I am not aware of any affordable wideband receiver that can handle trunking, except maybe the BR330T, and certainly not any that handles digital.

[Alliance01TX]

A couple of points to ponder...First if your HF (Shortwave) listening is normally only in the 'AM' bands (meaning mostly VOA or BBC type commerical stations) then most good quality wide-band receivers will be fine....

However, if you want to explore the 'Side Bands' (upper & lower) many of the wideband receivers are-not very great in those areas and can sometimes be off-frequency by enough to miss the comm's. Most folks whom are listening to HF opt to have a 'dedicated HF rig' as they have various filters and tuners to bring in weak signals when many (not all) wideband rigs will (if you are lucky) be able to 'hear' those comm's.

...And it depends on your location, antenna type and height of the antenna and other factors such as type and length of coax to-from the Radio~Antenna....etc...

So if you want to hear, for example, the U.S. Air Force comm's on HF most would recommend a dedicated HF receiver as these type comm's are spotty verus typical VHF/UHF comm's (Fire/Police, etc..) that are active in metro areas. Same for most AERO bands with airlines that transit the oceans and use SECAL reporting, etc...

All choices are right, just depends on a lot of factors, technical capabilities and preferences...I have dedicated HF using an ICOM R-71A for HF and scanners for the other (non HF) bands...

I am sure other folks will provide a point of view, and just depends on many factors....

Best of Luck

[nickcarr]

The other not-so obvious points: a true HF receiver has dedicated features that help receiving fading or weak SSB signals. The newer radios have several bandwidth options, DSP noise reduction, DSP IF, noise blankers, notch filters and usually much higher frequency resolution and stability.

There's a big difference.

The only true wideband radio that I know of that is decent on shortwave is the Icom R-20. It can do it all - but it's far from perfect. If I needed a wideband radio with shortwave SSB capability then it would be the R-20. (I've heard the AOR 8200MK2 series is pretty good but I've never used one personally.)

[n2nov]

My Yupiteru-7100 from the mid-90's did a decent job on shortwave for both AM (broadcast stations) as well as SSB (hams and utility stations). I even used it in SSB for amateur satellites in the VHF band. As for VHF/UHF scanning, it was prone to some intermod on UHF (I live in NYC). It does not trunktrack or is programmable by computer. Hand programming 1000 channels can get quite tiring.