good scanner

[rafale01010]

What do you suggest for a handheld scanner that willl pick up the military aviation band?My 96 doesnt and I was kinda upset when I found that out.

 

[n4voxgill]

use Win96 to open milair spectrum. I listen to military planes around San Antonio everyday with by my Pro96.

 

[ka3jjz]

A word of caution - not every PRO-96 works well in the UHF band when opened up with Win96. This has been well documented elsewhere - including Larry Van Horn's MT review. If you get one that works well count yourself fortunate. The problem is that this scanner was never designed to work in that band in the first place.

Fortunately there are many newer RS scanners out there that cover this band well. There are a couple of hooks to keep in mind, though - one important one is that there are several newer 380 mhz trunk systems being installed, and some of these are P25 digital. The newer digital trunktrackers can handle these - however, many of the RS scanners are analog-only, which limits their usefulness somewhat if your area has one of these.

Personally I'd get an Uniden or GRE. The Unidens, to me, have an edge because software for them, for logging and recording, is mature enough that there are a lot of options available. Not quite so with the GRE models, although I expect that will eventually change.
Keep in mind that RS models cannot log frequencies, record and so on - something I know a fair number of milcom folks do in order to keep track of what's going on while they're away (work, running errands, ect.). It's a firmware issue.

Oh and by the way, check that spelling, rafale - it's 'duct tape', not the tape for waterfowl :.>> I chuckled when I read that though - funny...

73s Mike

 

[eorange]

Personally I'd get an Uniden or GRE. The Unidens, to me, have an edge because software for them, for logging and recording, is mature enough that there are a lot of options available. Not quite so with the GRE models, although I expect that will eventually change.

For the GRE PSR-500: Win500 from Starrsoft does a great job of logging and recording activity. I would highly recommend this quality software.

The PSR-500 does fine on UHF mil air, but is easily overloaded for VHF mil air. A novel feature of the PSR-500: it can record hit counts right in the scanner, which is excellent for computer-less mil air logging. Win500 can download and display these hit counts (of course you can view them in the PSR-500 one-by-one).

I also have a BR330T from Uniden, and it does fine for UHF mil air. I don't use it a lot for VHF mil air; it gets overloaded a bit too.

 

[N9JCQ]

If youy can find a Yupiteru 7100, or Radio Shack Pro-43 uesed, they are terrific for MILAIR and CIVILAIR

 

[freqhunter]

Aor

I have great luck with my AOR AR8200 & AR8200MKIII. I use Spectrum Commander to manage and log data.

 

[iMONITOR]

With the appropriate software, I think Uniden's BC898T should also be considered. ARC898, or ScanControl, are two good ones.

 

[ka3jjz]

As long as you already have a scanner that works in the 138-144 mhz AM band, the combination of the old BC895 and Radiomax software makes a fine combination. The software vastly increases the scan channels, to way beyond the current DMA levels (although I still have a hard time fathoming how someone would want to scan 6400 channels at once...). I wrote a review on RadioMax for the Strong Signals website if you're interested. Sadly the 895 cannot receive 138-144 mhz in AM; if it did, and had alpha tags (which were a real novelty for radios of this time) it would have been far better, but for UHF milair (and VHF freqs that don't require a mode change) this works quite well.

73s Mike