Scanner Tales: More weird scanners

[ratboy]

I had a ton of oddball scanners, including the Scanocular, and yes it was as bad, or worse than you heard. Mine useless at home, the truckers on the Turnpike made the squelch break constantly, and when the TARTA buses were busy, they could be heard almost anywhere in the 450-470Mhz range. Only out in the sticks was it "clean", and there wasn't constant squelch breaking and intermod/images. Later on, I had the binocs with the digital camera built into them too, another dud product. They could have made it so much better with very little effort.

A lot of Uniden built radios shared the TARTA problem. I had the infamous Regency HX-2000, which had the "crunchy squelch"that I finally modded to fix it. A friend bought it from me and less than a week later, dropped it into the Maumee river near downtown and that was the end of it. Other oddballs were the Yupiteru 9000, Welz 1000, Maycom 108(I still have it), AR900, and a bunch of HT's that were at least fair scanners, like the Standard C510, which wasn't bad at all, except for the weak audio. A lot of those radios were tons better with an earphone. I can only take about an hour with head/earphones and I'm done. Programming some of those oddballs was tedious beyond belief. And in the case of the AR900, it locked up all the time, and to get it working again, you had to lose everything.

 

[Falcon9h]

Memorable thread! I have a Searcher (big one) that I picked up but sensitivity is non-existent. Had an MX-7000 but it was quirky and full of birdies. AOR was, and is, totally unaffordable. I wish I never got rid of thr HX-1000. Best scanner I ever had and I koved the HT look. Never got to try the MR8100, and they go for big bucks now. (Fat fingers giving up correcting. 🤬)

 

[Eng74]

The 2026 was the first scanner I had as a mobile scanner in my 1984 Ford Ranger. It had a pretty good speaker in it.

 

[Nasby]

I actually loved the 2026. Yeah it was quirky to program but back then, frequencies seldom changed. So once it was programmed it was set.

The best thing was its size!
It could easily be mounted in almost any vehicle.

The monstrous size of the Pro2004, Pro2006 and other so-called mobile scanners made them very cumbersome and nearly impractical to install and use in a vehicle.

 

[IC-R20]

Had to look that one up.

Memorex MSB1003 Scannocular

Just what I need for birdwatching. I can finally hone in on the control channel they use to receive orders from the government.

 

[kc8jwt]

I actaully still have a Pro-2026 and it still works. I had it in my car mounted on top of my CB at the time. When I got into ham radio, It was part of the mount with that as well. With the area that I scanned it was pretty rural, so I didn't suffer those sensitivity issues. Even where I have it now, in a more urban setting I don't have to many issues.

 

[fxdscon]

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My Sears 5 band programmable scanner (made by SBE). Programmed with slide-in 16 position punch cards. Best sounding audio of any scanner I've owned.

 

[N9JIG]

My Sears 5 band programmable scanner (made by SBE). Programmed with slide-in 16 position punch cards. Best sounding audio of any scanner I've owned.

There was a guy making after-market cards for the SBE scanners I read about years back, I suppose they could be made of properly sized cardboard.

There was also a source years back for combs for the Regency Whamo-10, another weird radio I have written about in the past.

 

[fxdscon]

I suppose they could be made of properly sized cardboard.

The original cards had numbered squares that you peeled off of the top surface of the card to reveal a punched hole under that square. I had it in storage for a while, and when I pulled it out those cards had curled up and the sticky squares dried out and fell off. After very careful measuring of the 2 remaining originals I had that were pinned flat under some books, and many trial and error attempts, I was finally able to come up with a PDF template for reproductions that work very well.

The working cards are printed on 40lb card stock. The card on the right in the pic is punched for local NOAA @ 162.475. Punch code for that is 0010101100011000 (1=punch, 0=no punch). I use a 1/8 punch for the holes, it's surprising how precise they need to be to function correctly.

 

[IC-R20]

.

My Sears 5 band programmable scanner (made by SBE). Programmed with slide-in 16 position punch cards. Best sounding audio of any scanner I've owned.

View attachment 184982

That's pretty sweet. I love punchcard programming.

 

[kc2asb]

.My Sears 5 band programmable scanner (made by SBE). Programmed with slide-in 16 position punch cards. Best sounding audio of any scanner I've owned.

Electra Bearcat, Radio Shack and Tennelec had a different approach, utilizing a codebook and 16 toggle switches to program in a binary code for each frequency. Regency had a model that used metal "combs" and teeth would be broken off to program the unit. Very innovative at the time. - no more expensive crystals needed

 

[dispatchgeek]

I'm gonna add to this thread- The Sony Wavehawk

I bought one at a hamfest. I wanted to love it, but the mental and physical gymnastics of programming the thing was a chore. If I remember right, programming a channel involved holding down multiple buttons while entering your frequency. It was also only double conversion and sometimes suffered from interference where other scanners were happily scanning away.

I just couldn't love this like I wanted to. I like the form factor, it did pretty well on airshow monitoring as well. Programming it just... sucked. I eventually sold it on eBay for more than I paid for it.

 

[ratboy]

I'm gonna add to this thread- The Sony Wavehawk

I bought one at a hamfest. I wanted to love it, but the mental and physical gymnastics of programming the thing was a chore. If I remember right, programming a channel involved holding down multiple buttons while entering your frequency. It was also only double conversion and sometimes suffered from interference where other scanners were happily scanning away.

I just couldn't love this like I wanted to. I like the form factor, it did pretty well on airshow monitoring as well. Programming it just... sucked. I eventually sold it on eBay for more than I paid for it.

I didn't like mine either, and I took it down to Universal to see what I could get for it, but before they opened, I was sitting next to some train tracks and it was very busy with all kinds of rail traffic, and one of the guys who was in the motel nearby heard it, and ended up giving me what I paid for it a year earlier. I think he was a Sony fanboi, as when he saw the name he got all excited.

 

[dispatchgeek]

Proof positive- photo from the one time I let my Wavehawk really stretch its legs. We lived pretty close to our local airport at the time. Blue Angels were up. Wavehawk was handling the UHF Milair side, Pro-137 (another oddball?) was handling the air boss.

 

[N9JIG]

I don't think I ever had that Sony WaveHawk but always wanted one. One of the CARMA guys had one and it seemed to be a great receiver but like you guys said, a real bear to program. I ended up going the AR900 then AR8000 route instead at the time.

At the time Sony had a great reputation for high quality and good value. I wonder if this may have been a private-label product.

 

[kc2asb]

This one might qualify as slightly weird. I have one of these in my collection of vintage scanners, a Heathkit GR-110. Found it at a hamfest over 25 years ago. It's an 8 channel crystal scanner, with channels numbered zero through seven( 0 - 7) and a digital channel display. Probably one of the few scanners available as a kit. Mine powers up but I never had any luck getting it to receive.

GR-110 Amateur-R Heathkit Brand, Heath Co.; Benton Harbor MI, build |Radiomuseum.org

GR-110 Amateur-R Heathkit Brand, Heath Co.; Benton Harbor MI, build 1973–1976 ??, 2 pictures, 3 schematics, United States of America , tubes

www.radiomuseum.org

 

[dispatchgeek]

I don't think I ever had that Sony WaveHawk but always wanted one. One of the CARMA guys had one and it seemed to be a great receiver but like you guys said, a real bear to program. I ended up going the AR900 then AR8000 route instead at the time.

At the time Sony had a great reputation for high quality and good value. I wonder if this may have been a private-label product.

I think it was a legit Sony product. The physical fit and feel was spot on for other Sony products of the era. The programming almost felt like it was logical to the engineer who designed the workflow, but not to the userbase that would be buying it.

 

[kc2asb]

I think it was a legit Sony product. The physical fit and feel was spot on for other Sony products of the era. The programming almost felt like it was logical to the engineer who designed the workflow, but not to the userbase that would be buying it.

It was not the only difficult-to-program scanner of the era. The AOR AR-1000 was notorious in this regard, and had a very poor instruction manual to boot. 1,000 channels, and it could only be programmed manually.

 

[dispatchgeek]

It was not the only difficult-to-program scanner of the era. The AOR AR-1000 was notorious in this regard, and had a very poor instruction manual to boot. 1,000 channels, and it could only be programmed manually.

I think I remember that from an AR-2515 I had as well. The memory structure was odd.

 

[csh102]

I never did, but I knew someone that owned one. Analog only, no trunking, PC programmable, Alpha/numeric display.

If I recall correctly, CHP used them in some of their cars for a while. They had a unique wiring harness for them.

Folks, . . . Does anyone here recognize the specific wire harness connector style ? The original external speaker was the SP-1. I'm attempting to restore two of these old workhorses using the factory type connectors. Are they MOLEX, or Ampseal, or Amphenol ? I dunno.