New member question about BDC436HP

[Bigman59]

We are looking for a scanner that will pickup the city, county, and state police. We live in Magnolia Ar and the BCD436HP I think will work for this. I just need to know if it will pickup all the channels that are in this area, and it is easy to use.

 

[hiegtx]

We are looking for a scanner that will pickup the city, county, and state police. We live in Magnolia Ar and the BCD436HP I think will work for this. I just need to know if it will pickup all the channels that are in this area, and it is easy to use.

Hi Bigman, welcome to Radio Reference.

Looking at your county, Columbia, in the database, it appears that two of the Sheriff's Office frequencies, North & South (dispatch, I presume) are using DMR radios, MotoTrbo. There is no scanner available that will scan MotoTrbo, or the other fairly common DMR format Nexedge.

The rest of the county frequencies, including fire, are on standard conventional frequencies. I see a note that "Columbia County Central Dispatch uses Arkansas Wireless Information Network (AWIN)." AWIN is the statewide digital trunked system, used by the sate police & other state agencies, as well as many of the county and cities.Your city, Magnolia, lists only conventional frequencies.

The BCD436HP would cover all of your local users except the two DMR channels used by the Sheriff. Of the other counties surrounding your's (Union, Ouachita, Nevada, and Lafayette) most have a few frequencies labeled as DMR or NXDN (that's the Nexedge) that no scanner can decode, but most of the usage appears to be convention, with some also on AWIN. The 436HP can handle the conventional & AWIN. Just across the border in Louisiana, the closest parishes are using either conventional frequencies, or LWIN (which is the statewide digital system). Again, the 436HP (and a number of other scanners) can handle that. I use my 436 here in the DFW metro area, and it works well for the variety of the systems in use.

If you would like more comments from someone in your state, use the red outlined triangle in the upper right corner of your post to "report" your thread, then in your comments, ask that it be moved to the Arkansas forum. Don't just start a new tyhread for the same issue there, since that would be cross-posting the same topic, something not allowed on this site.