Icom scanners..

[twheat]

Hello,

I am getting back into scanning mainly police stuff. I have a relative that works for Icom and has the opportunity to get the radios really cheap. I want to pick up one of their scanners. Most of the police agencies around here are trunked or on digital freqs. What scanner can you guys recommend for a handheld that works with trunked systems or digital. I used a RS pro-97 and really liked how easy it was to use. Are the Icoms easy to use? Any other recommendations are great! Thanks!

 

[Radiorick]

Not sure that any icom scanner handheld can monitor a trunked system.

 

[iMONITOR]

ICOM makes excellent communications receivers, but none of them are what I would call even good scanners. They're scan speed is slow, compared to an actual scanner. They're complex, cumbersome, and confusing to program, and operate when compared to regular scanners.

None of them will do trunking on their own. Some computer controlled Icoms are capable of trunking but it's somewhat of a kludge. Recently they introduced the PCR2500, and R2500 series, that has a digital option board, but there's issues with that as well, and the whole ball of wax is very expensive too!

You're really better off to stay with "scanners" made by Uniden, or GRE (Radio Shack's).

 

[MarkWestin]

First of all, Icom doesn't make "scanners", they make radio receivers which are able to scan. None of the Icom radios can trunk track, and none of their hand held units can receive and decode digital (APCO25) signals. It is possible to use software and a computer to make several of the base type Icom receivers trunk track. The only Icom receivers at the moment that can receive and decode APCO25 are the IC-R2500, IC-PCR2500, and the IC-R9500, all of which require an optional board to decode the APCO25 signal.

This is not to say that Icom does not make a good product. The IC-R20 and IC-R2500 are both very good receivers, and I wouldn't mind owning either one. The unblocked models are much more useful because they don't have the several frequencies blocked out (in addition to the "Cell Phone" frequencies) in order for the radio to meet the FCC specs. The unblocked radios may be very difficult to get unless you can get an "export" model.

I have the IC-R5 radio. It is the most difficult radio that I own to program, even when using their software. It is a good but far from great receiver. Its good points are that it is small and runs on two AA batteries. Its bad points include terrible selectivity and the front end is easily overloaded and it is blown away by intermod from pagers. I wouldn't buy this one again, but I wouldn't sell it either.

Mark

 

[Radiorick]

The PCR1000 can work with trunking (w/ software and a few extras)