Please help a complete novice.

[ronnielnichols]

I have a Uniden BCT-8 purchased about 2 yrs ago. I have so far been able to receive only a few channels, and nearly no police, fire, emergency, etc. In addition, my local law enforcement departments recently began conversion to digital and trunking systems. (Some of them have completed conversion) Is there somewhere I can take or send my unit to have it programmed for my particular area ? (AC 32405) , or is there another solution ? (All my other scanners only required pressing the "ON" button--I guess those days are long-gone) Thanks for any advice rln

[mtindor]

I have no familiarity with the BCT8. Given your area code, you are wanting to monitor Bay County FL.

The RadioReference database has information for Bay County. It appears as though there are some conventional frequencies in use there that you may want to program in. It also appears that most of the traffic you would want to hear is on the Bay County 800 Mhz TRS - which happens to be one of the few trunked systems in Bay County that you can pick up on the BCT8. It looks like you could also monitor the Naval Coastal Systems Center and the Tyndall AFB analog system. But my guess is that the Bay County 800 mhz TRS is probably the one you want to listen to.

You could program the system in manually, or you could download and/or purchase software that would work with your BCT8 such as ARC8 from Butel. The RadioRerefence Wiki lists some other software you could use too. But you would need to have the proper cabling to go between the computer and the scanner. Take a look at the RR Wiki info - http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/BCT8 .

If you wanted to go ahead and program it manually, get the manual out and read it - Especially the section about programming trunked systems starting on page 29 or 30 of the manual. You can view an online version of the manual here - Uniden BCT8 Manual.

You'll have to decide which bank in your scanner you want to use for tracking that particular trunked system.

I'm sure others can and will chime in with more useful information. I just figured I'd post to tell you not to give up hope - It looks like there may be a lot to be heard on that Bay County system that would be exciting for you - and it shouldn't take too long to program in the Bay County 800 mhz system - It's Motorola Type II - Basically you'd follow the manual instructions for programming in a Motorola Type II system and then, if you didn't want to enter in all of hte talk groups, just run it in ID Search mode for now so that it would pick up and let you listen to all transmissions on the trunked system.

Mike