The `895 was a good trunktracker in it's day, but not so much anymore in areas where trunked systems have been "rebanded". Rebanding is explained elsewhere on this site in much more detail but suffice it to say that it's where different 800 Mhz freq's are now in use than when the 895 was made. Problem is that the radio's firmware cannot be upgraded to accept these new 800 Mhz freq's. This pretty much renders it obsolete in areas where rebanded trunked Motorola systems are in use as your radio will only receive some of the system's traffic.
Other issues are:
- you had to make your own cable to connect it to a serial port on your PC and find some software (like "Andy's spreadsheet") to program it easily.
- that because it was an early trunktracker it did not have the ability to display alpha-text display for talkgroups. <groan>
- it was limited to five banks of talkgroups with 10 talkgroups-per-bank
- it would not scan conventional while trunktracking and would only scan one trunked system at a time.
All of those issues were important if you were to program large systems in a metro area.
If you decide to go for it anyway, be sure to follow the programming directions in the manual very closely. Those early Unidens had a critical step in programming the freq's as TRUNKING SYSTEM FREQ's and if they were not entered the correct way then the raido would not track the trunking data, it would just scan the freq's like a regular scanner.
In today's south Florida, I'd save my money for a newer digital radio and relegate the BC895XLT to monitoring other non-trunked stuff. As I recall, mine old one had a pretty hot receiver and got a lot of service strapped to the organizer on the front seat of my cruiser as it wasn't really designed to be a mobile rig.
More info on this radio is available at:
BC895XLT - The RadioReference Wiki
My nickel's worth.
\/ern
