Listening to Santa Clara County is kind of useless at this point because it's only fire and EMS, scanner just sits there quiet most of the time. East Bay is all open right now, but will also eventually go encrypted. San Mateo County is currently mostly UHF analog and open but would also eventually go encrypted. San Francisco is open for the very moment, but is also going encrypted sometime during the summer.
You will only have Fire and EMS once everything is encrypted, which could take up to 3 years or so. I have an sds100, I also had a BCD436HP until I broke it. The BCD436HP should also be good. However some of the digital systems are Simulcast, which the scanner doesn't perform the best in. The SDS100 does do better with those systems, but is more expensive. I prefer the BCD436HP, I feel like its speaker is better, analog quality is also better. it has several features such as keypad lock, and per channel squelch that SDS 100 no longer has. The SDS 100 has a nice colored screen, and the better simulcast performance.
I also used Software Defined Radios in the Bay Area, using softwares such as SDRTrunk, and OP25.
Reception of certain systems is limited in different areas. The trunked systems such as SVRCS in the Santa Clara County, and EBRCS, in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, can be picked up well enough a bit outside the counties. I am able to monitor the South West site of EBRCS in Sunnyvale. But picking up the Type 2 Smartzone San Francisco system in Sunnyvale even with good antennas yielded poor quality. While digitally the control channel was able to be decoded the analog audio was poor, and unusable. Additionally monitoring San Mateo County analog PD channels, such as East Palo Alto, San Mateo, etc was also poor, and unusable in Sunnyvale, this was using a Motorola XTS 5000.
Despite all this, I love my Uniden scanner, I use it all the time, when traveling, driving around, and at home. Some of the Broadcastify feeds are really good. The San Jose Fire feed I believe is an official feed, and the quality of the decoded P25 audio is as good as it gets. It also monitors the dispatch talkgroup, and all the command talkgroups at the same time. While a scanner can only actively play one talkgroup at a time. San Mateo county lacks feeds on Broadcastify. San Francisco didn't really have good feeds, they also recently went offline I believe. I can only pick up San Francisco well while in San Francisco.
It all depends on what and where exactly you want to use it. If you are fine with just Fire & EMS then it could be a good investment, but just be aware that California is basically requiring all law enforcement agencies to encrypt their radios.
