Personally, if I were you, Fenix, I'd buy an HP-1. I have two of them and wouldn't buy anything else. (No doubt I'll get an earfull from one particular person on this thread for that but I don't mind...it has nothing to do with the manufacturer and everything to do with the radio!)
Shell
Hey Shelley, how have you been? I've not seen you around much!
I'd forgot that you are near me, do you use your HP-1's to monitor the STL City P25 system at all? If so, how does it work from your location?
I can drive down to Crestwood and the P25 system comes in fantastic on any of the Unidens from there.
Forgiving the P25 problem I have with the cities P25 system on my XT series Unidens, I'd also still recommend one of the Uniden's. As far as I'm concerned, the Unidens have far superior receivers in them.
The GRE's I own are pretty much useless here for everything but 800 MHz systems. They overload easily from the paging systems near here plus the counties signals that are broadcast from the EOC towers. I'm just down the street from the EOC.
I also own an HP-1 and I like it a lot. I prefer the 996XT though for much of my scanning needs other than the cities P25 system. I usually mirror what I'm doing with the 996XT on the HP-1 and then use the HP-1's recording feature in case I miss something. I love the record feature!
Tonight I decided to try some of the Illinois Starcom sites. I've not tried Starcom since the leaves fell from all the trees. I found that I can get one site, 3-025 or the Edwardsville site. I get a decent signal on the 996XT but nothing at all on a GRE PSR-600. It shows signal strength bars but will not decode anything. I assume the signal bars are indications of other signals from all the cell towers located all around this area.
My main interests are the county and muni police and fire in our neck of the woods. The Unidens (including the HP-1) work great for these VHF channels while the GRE's are highly susceptible to overload or desense.
Of course I hear you out there as well!
Regarding the issue with P25 systems and Uniden, the manual decode setting is something they should have left in the XT series radios. It is truly a feature that makes the radios receive a system or not as is confirmed by the older T series which has the manual setting capability.
Other than that one issue, I like the Unidens much better than the GRE's or Radio Shack clones. Without a doubt, the front ends in the Unidens are much better than the GRE's. The old GRE's like the old Radio Shack Pro-2004, 2006 for example, also had really nice front ends but GRE seems to have slipped in that area with their current models of the last few years. At least that is how I see it.
The GRE's do work ok once you get away from high RF environment such as ours but so do the Unidens.
I own several of each manufacturers current and past model scanners. Without a doubt, the Unidens are powered on about 99% of the time while the GRE's are only on 1% of the time that I'm monitoring.
Unless the fire trucks roll, then they all may come on!
For the nights I monitor a single frequency (Chesterfield mainly), I do that with an Icom R9000 as there is not much that will overload that receiver!
How is Ron F. doing? I've not talked with him in ages.
Hope this makes it as it took me about 45 minutes to get this site to open up tonight. It kept timing out or stalling on me.
I think they need to move something off the main site as I guess the live audio feeds put a big strain in the server.
I need to put the starcom 3-025 site into the HP-1, this is an very active system tonight!
The signal from this tower must improve late night as the GRE is trying to decode some of it now. The 996XT is decoding it with 0 errors though.
See Ya and glad to see you are still around here!
