general question about old scanners.

[daorllim]

Hi, first post
I have 2 scanners that i bought from radio shack yrs ago (2000-2003) and they have been just moved around from drawer to drawer and cupboard ect. I decided to see if they would still work. one is a PRO-2018 and the other is a hand held PRO-82.. neither scan the channels any more and seem to get locked in one place, question is are they obsolete now?

 

[jrplmil]

No They will work ok in a lot of areas such as mine. We have trunking by the gas company and thats all. There is always a list of birdys that will lock of a scanner and that might be whats happening to you. You can lockout the frequencies and it should start to scan if that is the problem. Good luck
James

 

[ab8sn]

Pro 82

Hi, first post
I have 2 scanners that i bought from radio shack yrs ago (2000-2003) and they have been just moved around from drawer to drawer and cupboard ect. I decided to see if they would still work. one is a PRO-2018 and the other is a hand held PRO-82.. neither scan the channels any more and seem to get locked in one place, question is are they obsolete now?

No they are not obselete for all areas yet. My local area still uses basic conventional analog. I have several Pro 82's and they are great radios for the money. Too bad they quit making them.

73s

Chad

 

[gmclam]

Welcome to RadioReference.com !!!

LOL. I wouldn't consider anything built in this decade to be "old". If you want to talk about old scanners, you should consider those in which crystals were needed for each channel you wanted to scan.

I am not sure what you mean when you say "they won't scan". If that means the channels don't advance or if it just doesn't stop on anything. The first thing you can do with most scanners just to make sure the radio portion is working is to set them to a NOAA Weather frequency (162.xxx MHz). I have three I can receive here: 162.400, 162.425 & 162.550 MHz.

If you're picking up the weather OK and the scanner doesn't stop on other frequencies, it sounds like the scanners need to be programmed with current active frequencies. Perhaps your immediate area has moved to frequencies or a system those scanners can not receive, but somewhere those scanners would do the job someone needs.

 

[kb2vxa]

"neither scan the channels any more and seem to get locked in one place"
OK, a rhetorical question; what are they locking up on? If it's a signal of some sort it would seem normal, some receivers generate their own birdies so if it sounds like a continuous unmodulated carrier likely that's what it is. If it stumbles and stalls while scanning with nothing at all heard on the channel you have problems with the scan control board.

If they have been lying around without having been switched on in a long time like a few years maybe it's my educated guess some of the electrolytic capacitors have changed value or developed electrical leakage. Moisture and contamination is another safe bet, cupboard says kitchen, steam, cooking vapors, grease and dust.

 

[daorllim]

thanks for the replys everyone. After reading them, I found the books and done some studying in them,(more reading than i've done in 20 yrs, since i was 50. Anyway i reset and re-initialized both of them, put the frequencie numbers back in them and they work great.

 

[kb2vxa]

Oh good grief, scanners are like people; when they get old they tend to forget and you forgot it would. (;->)

 

[dstephns]

Hi, first post
I have 2 scanners that i bought from radio shack yrs ago (2000-2003) and they have been just moved around from drawer to drawer and cupboard ect. I decided to see if they would still work. one is a PRO-2018 and the other is a hand held PRO-82.. neither scan the channels any more and seem to get locked in one place, question is are they obsolete now?

Not sure that this applies to your scanners but I have an old Regency analog scanner that the battery went dead on and when I charged it up after a long sleep all of my old programmed freqs. were locked out (LO) on my scanner. As soon as unlocked it it would scann to the next LO'd freq. I had to unlock all the channels.