Purchase a radio for railfanning

[buddrousa]

Most bad reviews for Uniden come from non-owners repeating what they heard.
Scanners should never be compared to radios pagers or wide band receivers they should only be compared to other scanners.
Now for me I run my normal configuration
bcd325p2 bcd436hp sds100 and bcd160 all sharing the sme antenna at the same time using my stridsberg multicoupler and the all have good range vhf uhf 700/800 both analog and digital.

 

[nickwilson159]

Most bad reviews for Uniden come from non-owners repeating what they heard.
Scanners should never be compared to radios pagers or wide band receivers they should only be compared to other scanners.
Now for me I run my normal configuration
bcd325p2 bcd436hp sds100 and bcd160 all sharing the sme antenna at the same time using my stridsberg multicoupler and the all have good range vhf uhf 700/800 both analog and digital.

If you're dead set on a scanner, then sure. Most railfans don't care if it's a scanner, a radio, or a receiver though, they simply care about being able to hear what trains are coming - something all of these devices can accomplish, but definitely have different performance characteristics in doing so.

If they want to listen to more than just rail, then it's a different story. But strictly for rail and wanting as much advance notice as possible of a pending train movement, then RX characteristics are the biggest factor, and that's something where most two-way radios and some receivers handily beat most scanners.

 

[wa8pyr]

If you're dead set on a scanner, then sure. Most railfans don't care if it's a scanner, a radio, or a receiver though, they simply care about being able to hear what trains are coming - something all of these devices can accomplish, but definitely have different performance characteristics in doing so.

If they want to listen to more than just rail, then it's a different story. But strictly for rail and wanting as much advance notice as possible of a pending train movement, then RX characteristics are the biggest factor, and that's something where most two-way radios and some receivers handily beat most scanners.

This is true, but if the person is a relative newbie at this, a two-way is going to be considerably more to get involved with than a scanner, especially at the price point differential. Besides, since it does more than just VHF a scanner can be used for monitoring lots of other stuff should rail monitoring get stale.