I just spent 6 weeks in Tucson monitoring. To tell the truth with he amount of traffic down there my BCD325P2 & BCD996XT worked just as good as the SDS200. Just my 5cents....
I'm guessing you mean 996P2, since the 996XT won't work on a TDMA-only system like PCWIN.
I guess I can give the opposing perspective, so the OP's mileage may vary. I spend only a few weeks a year in Tucson, but when I do I spend quite a bit of time monitoring PCWIN. For me, my SDS100 is the only 'consumer grade' scanner that has ever worked on PCWIN to a level I find "acceptable" (though I acknowledge I have high standards for these things), but even it didn't quite keep up with the decode quality of my Unication G5 on the Simulcast sites. On the single-tower sites like Bigelow and Keystone, of course any decent Phase II capable scanner performs fine so long as it has a decent signal. My KNG and KNG2 radios perform the best of them all by far, but if that isn't in your budget, in my experience the G5 is next best and the SDS100 (and presumably SDS200, but I don't own one) after that. Everything else falls in line behind those.
My old BCD436HP experienced a lot of missed transmissions, late entry, and poor decode relative to my SDS100 and Unication G5. To be honest, I didn't fully realize just how bad my BCD436HP was on Phase II simulcast systems until I got a G5 and a KNG and then realized just how much I was missing and how much better it 'could' sound at any given location. PCWIN is a super-busy system, so if you think otherwise, you're probably missing a lot of transmissions and not realizing it.
In my experience, once you own a commercial grade P25 receiver like a Unication G5 or a BK KNG radio, you realize just how bad most consumer grade scanners sound on TDMA simulcast systems. But like I said, the SDS100 is pretty darn good for a consumer grade device, and is so different from a G5 it would be hard to chose between the two - it seems like you have to decide what you are really trying to accomplish before you know which is best. For one thing, absent using the Beta firmware, the G5 (like the KNG) can't scan two systems or sites at once, so even in the city you have to decide whether you are more interested in police (mostly simulcast A, but some overlap) or fire (mostly simulcast B, but some overlap). Or get two! Nevertheless, if you are deciding between a SDS100 or a G5, I think you will be pretty happy either way.
