Trouble listening to railroads Uniden Homepatrol II

[thebigdawg1472]

I got a Uniden Homepatrol II as a Christmas present this past December. I've been having issues listening to the railroads for about the past month or so. I can listen to fire and police just fine but I can't pick up the two local railroads here worth squat sometimes. I've changed from the stock antenna it came with to one that was on my old but scanner.

Any tips or tricks that could help?

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

Welcome to the RR forums. Assuming said railroads operate on analog as opposed to NXDN? Do you have any pick up on them whatsoever? If you programmed in the rail frequencies into a favorites list using Sentinel then you'll need to turn on the Railroad service type, it is not enabled by default.

 

[thebigdawg1472]

Welcome to the RR forums. Assuming said railroads operate on analog as opposed to NXDN? Do you have any pick up on them whatsoever? If you programmed in the rail frequencies into a favorites list using Sentinel then you'll need to turn on the Railroad service type, it is not enabled by default.

Railroad service type is enabled every time I go out though I don't use my favorites list as of right now to listen to them. It's CSX and the Kanawha River Railroad that I have around me and yes they are on analog still.

 

[tvengr]

Check if attenuator is turned on for the railroad frequencies. Also, check your squelch setting.

 

[Nasby]

Very likely an antenna issue. The factory antenna on the HP2 isn’t great at receiving VHF. Get something like a Diamond RH77CA or a Smiley antenna. Or better yet, an outside antenna.

 

[Ubbe]

The HP-I/II use a similar receiver as the BCD436 and they surprisingly often suffer from damaged amplifier transistors that will reduce reception or make it almost dead. It can be a cellular phone being too close to it that emits RF when updating it's location and sends a "here I am" message when it's laying on a table. And of course can be a bigger risk when on the phone while operating the scanner and having your head close to it to read its display.

If you earlier had listen to the NOAA channels and noted what signal strength the different channels had it could have been used as a reference to check each month if you still have the same signal strength. A receiver can be overloaded from other transmitters that will make the receiver loose sensitivity and the HP series and 436 doesn't use the best receivers that Uniden have designed to handle strong signal overload issues. If a new transmitter have been put in use in the VHF band then that could also make the HPII perform worse.

A HP-II doesn't have a bandscope that could have shown if there are any high power transmitters in your locations, so it's really difficult to know what the problem could be.

/Ubbe

 

[thebigdawg1472]

Check if attenuator is turned on for the railroad frequencies. Also, check your squelch setting.

The attenuator is turned off for the rail frequencies and my squelch is at a 3.