ReceiverBeaver said:
The point about becoming a ham is that ham VHF & UHF rigs, mobiles and handhelds all incorporate extended receive so they double as scanners. Modern rigs likewise have 100 or more memory channels so there's plenty of room for public saftey and other frequencies. Some rigs have a very large extended receive capability and do the DC to Daylight thing.
Most of the new Icom and Yaesu/VXSTD mobiles have many 100's of memorys, upwards of 1,000 (perhaps you meant to add the extra zero?)...they make great scanning radios as now some of them are coming with banks/zones, much like a scanner or commercial land mobile radio.
I'm actively considering a Yaesu FT-7800 or FT-8800 to replace my aging fleet of Motorola mobiles, since they are much more agile than the commercial gear, same TX power out on VHF ham channels (UHF is a non-issue here) and have 1,000 channel capability compared to 128 channels on the /\/\ gear. What better than a 1,000 channel scanner that talks too
Biggest peeve of mine with ham gear? Lack of dual priority scanning, nuisance delete and duty cycle.