NewSDScanner
Member
So I love scanning and I do it pretty much every day. I've gotten to the point where I listen to all types of law enforcement, fire, and other public safety in my area and I have a house scanner and a car scanner. I recently bought a nice external antenna for my car and mounted it. The antenna is good and it does allow my scanner to pick up farther signals than it could before. Since it has gain, signals seems to be a bit louder and in some cases more real-sounding as well.
However, it also really hasn't improved things as much as I thought it would. In fact, I've noticed that while it has allowed me to pick up farther signals, it has also amplified radio noise. I feel like since the antenna is 3-4x as long, in some cases, there is 3-4x louder or more frequent radio noise.
Since I've installed the antenna, I've noticed numerous times when I've been driving and a transmission is garbled or choppy or even making a "white noise" type of sound like the old TVs when you turned them to a nonexistent channel. I don't want to make it seem like this is ALWAYS happening, because it's not, but I feel like with a bigger antenna for some reason it's actually made things MORE sensitive sometimes.
Having said this, I use a PRO-106 and a GRE PSR-500 (fundamentally the same scanner), is there anything that I can do on the scanner side of things to fix some of these issues other than use the attenuator? Have I reached the official limits of the scanner? Do the public safety radios also sometimes feature some reliability issues or is this just because I'm using a scanner? Thanks.
However, it also really hasn't improved things as much as I thought it would. In fact, I've noticed that while it has allowed me to pick up farther signals, it has also amplified radio noise. I feel like since the antenna is 3-4x as long, in some cases, there is 3-4x louder or more frequent radio noise.
Since I've installed the antenna, I've noticed numerous times when I've been driving and a transmission is garbled or choppy or even making a "white noise" type of sound like the old TVs when you turned them to a nonexistent channel. I don't want to make it seem like this is ALWAYS happening, because it's not, but I feel like with a bigger antenna for some reason it's actually made things MORE sensitive sometimes.
Having said this, I use a PRO-106 and a GRE PSR-500 (fundamentally the same scanner), is there anything that I can do on the scanner side of things to fix some of these issues other than use the attenuator? Have I reached the official limits of the scanner? Do the public safety radios also sometimes feature some reliability issues or is this just because I'm using a scanner? Thanks.