I have a Pro2005, a Pro2006, a BC895 and a BC780 dedicated to listening to milair. I am about 10 miles from Randolph AFB and use a 2 meter ham, VHF, antenna hooked to a stridesburg multicoupler feeding the 4 scanners. They all pick up about the same. I can hear the tower at Randolph, but not the tower at sequin strip that is about 20 miles away. You can hear the planes from way out.
I also have an AOR, AR8200 MK3 handheld unit that does an excellent job, but with it's antenna can't pick up the tower from my house, but all of the planes. I have a Pro96 and now a Pro2096 that WIN96 opens up the milair band, and they work very well. I have not hooked the 2096 up to the outside antenna yet, but sitting here on my desk with its stock antenna I am picking up planes many miles out. I also use a Pro95, but it is not very good on milair. Planes have to be within a few miles to hear them.
There are more milair frequencies than any other group you would scan. If you want to scan for new frequencies it is a real challenge. You have to listen to 175 MHz of spectrum and even if you break it down to 10 MHz blocks you will miss short transmissions. It took me several weeks with four scanners searching 10 MHz blocks to come up with most of the frequencies in use near me.
I use ham radios to pick up the longrange HF frequencies used by the airforce, to most used is 11.175 MHz in USB. All coast guard planes use 8696 or 5696 KHz and that gets pretty interesting.
There is a lot to listen to out there.
