My daughter just started as a dispatcher in one of the metro Denver area law/fire agencies. I decided I would get a scanner to listen to her at her new job.
I was a scanner hobbyist 30+ years ago and even built a Heathkit scanner years ago. I know things have changed and the system I wanted to monitor is on the state DTRS trunking system.
I purchased a Uniden BCD 396XT even though I knew it would be a challenge to program it. I have always done well with computers and thought I was up to the challenge. I liked the radio but after several frustrating days trying to learn to program it I had to return it. Even with the help of this forum and the simpler on line manual I could not get any programming I attempted to work. After giving up on manually programming it I thought I could uses the Radio Reference lists and online software to program it, but had to give up on that also. I only have Mac computers and the Windows only software was a pain. I tried using an older Windows XP laptop with no success. It needed to many updates and did not have enough memory. I gave up, returned the 396 and bought the Home Patrol 1.
The Home Patrol 1 was almost as frustrating. I was able to program it with the touchscreen and the Sentinel software but found the latest version of the software was still missing a lot of the channels I wanted. Also the week antenna would not consistently pick up the channels I needed. I am about 25 miles from the location I was trying to hear and could only hear about 1/4 of the transmission that I could hear with my iPhone scanner app.
Needless to say the Home Patrol ! was returned also today. I could not justify paying $500.00 for a radio that preformed worse then my iPhone app.
I hope soon some of the newer radios will be Mac friendly and improve their range and antenna. The 396 would have probably worked, if I could have programmed it, but the short range/bad antenna on the Home Patrol 1 really killed the deal for me. I expect in 2013 that a $500.00 radio should do better and be more user friendly then the Uniden models I tried. Going to have to stick to the iPhone app for now!!
I was a scanner hobbyist 30+ years ago and even built a Heathkit scanner years ago. I know things have changed and the system I wanted to monitor is on the state DTRS trunking system.
I purchased a Uniden BCD 396XT even though I knew it would be a challenge to program it. I have always done well with computers and thought I was up to the challenge. I liked the radio but after several frustrating days trying to learn to program it I had to return it. Even with the help of this forum and the simpler on line manual I could not get any programming I attempted to work. After giving up on manually programming it I thought I could uses the Radio Reference lists and online software to program it, but had to give up on that also. I only have Mac computers and the Windows only software was a pain. I tried using an older Windows XP laptop with no success. It needed to many updates and did not have enough memory. I gave up, returned the 396 and bought the Home Patrol 1.
The Home Patrol 1 was almost as frustrating. I was able to program it with the touchscreen and the Sentinel software but found the latest version of the software was still missing a lot of the channels I wanted. Also the week antenna would not consistently pick up the channels I needed. I am about 25 miles from the location I was trying to hear and could only hear about 1/4 of the transmission that I could hear with my iPhone scanner app.
Needless to say the Home Patrol ! was returned also today. I could not justify paying $500.00 for a radio that preformed worse then my iPhone app.
I hope soon some of the newer radios will be Mac friendly and improve their range and antenna. The 396 would have probably worked, if I could have programmed it, but the short range/bad antenna on the Home Patrol 1 really killed the deal for me. I expect in 2013 that a $500.00 radio should do better and be more user friendly then the Uniden models I tried. Going to have to stick to the iPhone app for now!!