I want to buy a scanner but?

[StefanoDimera]

Hello Happy New Year to you all. I had old scanner which have been lost. Yet my question is what is a good scanner to buy? I live in Yeadon Pa and would like to hear the Philly and other areas like I use too! When I did go into Radio shack the man said that philadelphia was on a digital signal. Can anyone help and thanks in advance.

 

[captclint]

Yet my question is what is a good scanner to buy? I live in Yeadon Pa and would like to hear the Philly and other areas like I use too! When I did go into Radio shack the man said that philadelphia was on a digital signal. Can anyone help and thanks in advance.

Typically, the Philly system is tuned and directional so that you need to be within 5-8 miles to hear it. Someone closer to you would need to comment on your chances of them. I also seem to recall they are going with a proprietary system that can not be monitored with any scanner.
With that exception, most everything in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (PA) Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference is fairly std for all scanners. First, you need to decide on a hand held vs base.mobile. Here is a list of all current scanners : Category:Handheld Scanners - The RadioReference Wiki and Category:Mobile Scanners - The RadioReference Wiki I would tend to stay away from Radio Shack, as they are customer unfriendly, and are very slow to implement firmware changes to fix or improve. GRE scanners are very sensitive and are favored by those people in more rurual areas without any radio towers nearby. Towers within 5 miles or so will overload and block your ability to hear anything. Unidens to not have this problem unless you are really close, and trend to have more features. Beyond that, it is price that can help narrow down the choices. Both Uniden and GRE are excellent scanners. Since you don't seem to have any trunking systems, some the the lower price units should be fine. However, I think you would be more pleased with units such as PSR-400 - The RadioReference Wiki or PSR-300 - The RadioReference Wiki Both around $200 For uniden the BC15 or 346 The reason for these is partly because they have Automatic CTCSS identification - The RadioReference Wiki

 

[DELCOLHFC]

Welcome to RadioReference !

Hello Happy New Year to you all. I had old scanner which have been lost. Yet my question is what is a good scanner to buy? I live in Yeadon Pa and would like to hear the Philly and other areas like I use too! When I did go into Radio shack the man said that philadelphia was on a digital signal. Can anyone help and thanks in advance.

Hello and welcome to RR, you will find folks here to help with all of your scanner qeustions!
I am from Middletown Twp on the other side of Delco and I can listen to Philly with no problem, you are nearly in Philly over in Yeadon so you will have near perfect reception of their system. (for now, as the capt said they will be going to a new non-monitorable system sometime in the future or at least that's the plan for now. Hopefully their budget will squeeze them enough that some traffic will remain listenable....) The biggest question as to what scanner or type of scanner to get is how much you want to spend. You can find a decent low tech desktop model for under a hundred that will monitor Delco but the price to hear Philly or any other digital system will set you back at least four hundred (for the RadioShack models) or $500 for the GRE (same as the RS models but with extra items included) or Uniden.
So give it some thought and let us know what you plan to do, from there we can offer some more insights and advice as what may be a good scanner for you look at.
Tom