Looking to upgrade my scanning devices

[FoamerDavid]

Hi guys,

I am new here and fairly new to scanners. I read a lot about the subject in the pas weeks as I would like to upgrade my scanner. Right now, I have a Pro-404 from Radio-Shack and a Traintenna tuned for the RR obviously. I have a few questions before buying new equipment.

1- Is there a way to have a device that will give me the chance to listen/scan the raildoad frequencies AND communicate with the people when I am on the road in Canada ? Is the IC-2300h is a great tool for that ?

2- If no is the answer at question 1, should I be looking for a mobile scanner to have something better than the Pro-404.

3- I read in a book a great review about the IC-V80. The last model seems to be the V86. What do you think of this device to scan the railroad ?

Thank you very much!

Edit: If you have anything else to suggest, feel free to tell it to me. I would like something under 300$.

 

[a417]

Will the IC-2300h tune up into the 160 Mhz area?

amateur radios (&CCRs) are notoriously slow scanners. Unless the scanner you have is physically damaged and will not scan, or you need NXDN capabilities for trunking on the systems you are trying to scan, do you really need a new one? If there's not something wrong with your 404, why change?

you can buy a baofeng uv-5r for like $30 USD, so you can see if you really want an 'amateur' transciever to do your scanning...that's using the term loosely, those CCRs are truly junk... in my opinion.

 

[AK9R]

An IC-2300H may be able to scan railroad VHF frequencies, but you would not be able to communicate with it legally unless you got an amateur radio license.

 

[FoamerDavid]

My 404 works well. I was just thinking that I would be able to hear and pickup a little more things on the scanner with a mobile one.

 

[JoshuaHufford]

I use a Motorola CDM1550 for my railfan radio, it receives well, better than the Radio Shack PRO-2026 and Uniden BC75 XLT scanners that I have, but not by "that" much. What it is MUCH better than those other two is dealing with intermod. Also it has a better speaker and I can often hear speech better because of this. It will hold all of the ARR channels, but you can only scan 16 at a time with it, this usually isn't a problem though as I'm using only scanning a few channels at any one time.

I don't know much about the scanner that you have but if your not having intermod problems in the area you railfan, in my experience a VHF receiver isn't going to make a huge difference.

 

[JoshuaHufford]

Also, had another thought. I don't know that I would want to transmit on any radio that had the ARR channels programmed into it, just to avoid any possibility of accidentally transmitting on one of them.

If I were transmitting I would only program frequencies that were legal for me to transmit on into that radio, but that is just me.

 

[FoamerDavid]

What is "intermod" ?

 

[JoshuaHufford]

When a signal you are not tuned to bleeds over and breaks squelch on your radio. Ever have NOAA radio come over your scanner when scanning the railband?