So I bought a BC780XLT off someone on ebay, got it last night. I had heard so much positive stuff about this model I thought this will be great. This one seems to have some problems.
Now, I do live in a fairly RF intensive area; I have a DMR repeater a block from my house which causes all sorts of fun; I bought a VHF notch filter from PAR set to their frequency which helps enough that my Uniden scanners (BCT15X & BCD996XT) can deal with it, however I've never had luck with my Pro-2055 or PSR-400, to the point where the former is in storage and the latter was sold last year. The intent of this 780 by the way was to replace the Pro-2055.
At first I thought this 780 was just suffering the same overload issues as my GRE-built scanners, but now I'm not so sure. I took it out tonight to a location away from my home, next to the harbour which is fairly busy with marine traffic. Took my BCD396XT for comparison, which had no problem getting both the ship and coast side of the marine traffic channels. The 780 however, with the stock whip extended, had a lot of trouble with the ship side, and the coast side was gone entirely. Also tried to get the marine broadcast on 21B (161.650) and it was completely overpowered by the weather radio broadcast on 162.550, and that transmitter isn't even that close.
A couple additional observations:
- At home on my roof antenna (DPD OmniX) it can receive VHF better than my Pro-2055, which is completely deaf on VHF, however still not great. No significant improvement when using just the stock whip.
- Could receive a nearby UHF 400MHz repeater, however the audio sounded incredibly over-driven and was clipping a lot. Not sure if that's related to the receive issue, or a separate speaker issue.
So.. what do you guys think? Is this toast? Did I buy a lemon?
Now, I do live in a fairly RF intensive area; I have a DMR repeater a block from my house which causes all sorts of fun; I bought a VHF notch filter from PAR set to their frequency which helps enough that my Uniden scanners (BCT15X & BCD996XT) can deal with it, however I've never had luck with my Pro-2055 or PSR-400, to the point where the former is in storage and the latter was sold last year. The intent of this 780 by the way was to replace the Pro-2055.
At first I thought this 780 was just suffering the same overload issues as my GRE-built scanners, but now I'm not so sure. I took it out tonight to a location away from my home, next to the harbour which is fairly busy with marine traffic. Took my BCD396XT for comparison, which had no problem getting both the ship and coast side of the marine traffic channels. The 780 however, with the stock whip extended, had a lot of trouble with the ship side, and the coast side was gone entirely. Also tried to get the marine broadcast on 21B (161.650) and it was completely overpowered by the weather radio broadcast on 162.550, and that transmitter isn't even that close.
A couple additional observations:
- At home on my roof antenna (DPD OmniX) it can receive VHF better than my Pro-2055, which is completely deaf on VHF, however still not great. No significant improvement when using just the stock whip.
- Could receive a nearby UHF 400MHz repeater, however the audio sounded incredibly over-driven and was clipping a lot. Not sure if that's related to the receive issue, or a separate speaker issue.
So.. what do you guys think? Is this toast? Did I buy a lemon?
