I passed on the waterfall. I have it in my 100 but rarely use it
I am seriously considering an SDS200 in the near future. How much better does it receive analog and especially aircraft vs the SDS100?
They should be equally good. Uniden have set the bandwidth for the AM demodulator as it should be for VHF-AIR, that few scanners actually use including all Unidens non-SDS scanners, so that the audio quality are fantastic and also AM mode must use an automatic audio leveling function so that will automatically also be included. It has the best VHF-AIR audio of my scanners. It's just that the RF performance are so poor with intermod and overload issues that, depending of your RF situation, it might spoil your listening experience.
On my SDS100 in 118-137 I have actually heard the same transmission several Mhz up. I forget the target frequency and the image frequency which was lower intensity. That was discouraging. I don't try to use it for aviation. I have other scanners for civil and mil air. BCT15X and BCD996P2 is excellent on civil and mil air. No images, birdies or intermod. Only occasional intermod is with the back of set antenna. BCD325P2 is very good. BCD396XT very good. Pro-164 very good. I really wasn't expecting the SDS200 to be better. Just hoping.
The receiver from a BCT15x and instead use the SDR receiver as the last IF to make it handle simulcast would be the best scanner ever made.
That would be a great idea. BCT15X receiver with the SDR as final IF. I no longer have access to a communications test set. I retired from the Air Force in 2012 and miss all the great test equipment. That video tells it all. Using the Demodulator for selectivity is okay I suppose most of the time except when images or imtermod are overwhelming. What a lazy cheap way to design a receiver. I actually thought about using a broadband receiver and down converting to the antenna input of the SDS 100 with attenuation and translate the site frequencies to lower programmed frequencies, but I haven't really thought it all the way through. It would have to be band specific since switching in front end filtering per band would require hacking into the SDS100 to do band switching. There must be some sort of data stream from the SDS100 you could use to do that. But is it really worth the effort?
