HP or 996 xt?

[shores]

Hi,

I live in grey bruce, so listening is mostly limited to motorola trunked systems plus some local fire.
Most of the local police are encrypted or trbo/nextedge.

I will be listening in both my vehicle and at home.
I already have a BCT-8 for analog and bct-95xlt for analog as well.
There aren't any trunks setup on the bct-8.

The price is very comparable.
There's 2 or 3 tower sites like glammis, owen sound and then wiarton way that I might hit for OPP traffic, but other than that pretty static such as bruce county fire, grey county fire, etc.


Which would be a better fit for my needs in the area, the home patrol or the 396xt/996xt series?

The bct95xlt and bct-8 would probably be staying at home or relegated to a box as they aren't capable of picking up much interesting traffic these days.

Thanks!

 

[EJB]

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Having spent some time up in Bruce Co all I can say is that I think the 996CT is more senstive, less deaf than the Home Patrol.

What I mean by that if you are right on the verge of having a good enough signal to get a control channel I think that the 996XT is better for that than the HP.

I have a Home Patrol and it is frustrating because I am in Burlington and from my shack (LMAO) I face SW and I cannot get towers that are close by like Fonthill or Guelph Woodlawn.

I run an old Pro-2045 that is tapped for Trunk 88 and it has no problems getting a good signal on towers like Mowat, Fonthill, Skylon and even Simcoe (Norfolk) while the HP is too noisy to acquire the CC.

A buddy of mine on this forum once gave me his 996XT and it outperformed my 396T (The scanner I had at the time). I think the actual body of the scanner (less plastic) is better suited to getting signals.

If I had $ I'd get a 996XT to compliment my HP.

Now for the HP, I freaking love this scanner. It allows you to do so much and the updates such as UID tagging is amazing. I dont even really need the location control stuff but if I travel its good to have and very easy to program. I know the XT scanners will show RID's but I dont know if you can tag the RIDS (I.E. if RID 11105 is the OPP dispatch for the Burl/Niagara patch can you type this info in? With the HP you can, I have probably every EMS unit in the GTA tagged and every Fire Dept in Halton tagged.

I love that stuff so thats why I love the Home Patrol so much and thats why when I had the chance I jumped to get the HP.

I dont know if you are a whiz at programming but the 996XT is probably more challenging than the HP.

So, honestly, I cant tell you whats better, I want both .

 

[shores]

thanks for the info
and i dont need an RR subscription to get updates? not that anything gets updated much where i live
just need motorola p25 digital for opp/mto/ambulance in my area

is the HP1 phase 2 compatible in case the province ever upgrades in the future?

 

[fxdscon]

thanks for the info
and i dont need an RR subscription to get updates? not that anything gets updated much where i live
just need motorola p25 digital for opp/mto/ambulance in my area

is the HP1 phase 2 compatible in case the province ever upgrades in the future?

The Home Patrol does not need a subscription to RR to update the database, it is done through the Sentinel software that comes with the scanner, and it's free.

The Home Patrol does not have phase 2 capabilities.

.

 

[morrisr3nd]

The GRE PSR-800 is the only scanner out right now that will do Phase2 and TDMA.

 

[EJB]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9360; en) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.391 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

I wouldn't worry about updates, you still have 4 more years of listening.

My boss says he built Fleetnet in the late 90's, he says it is built to last.

I also can't see the govt spending multi millions on upgrades but u never know