What Are Some Of The More Sensitive And Selective Uniden Scanners on VHF And UHF That Have CTCSS/DCS Decode?

[JASII]

I have a Uniden SDS-100 now. I know that it is not particularly sensitive and selective on VHF (144-174 Mhz) and UHF (406-470 Mhz). I seem to recall that some legacy Uniden Bearcats were pretty good on VHF and UHF years ago and had CTCSS/DCS decode.

Would it pretty much be the BCT15X and BCD996XT for base/mobile scanners?

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[rf_patriot200]

I have a Uniden SDS-100 now. I know that it is not particularly sensitive and selective on VHF (144-174 Mhz) and UHF (406-470 Mhz). I seem to recall that some legacy Uniden Bearcats were pretty good on VHF and UHF years ago and had CTCSS/DCS decode.

Would it pretty much be the BCT15X and BCD996XT for base/mobile scanners?

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What antenna are you using on your 100 ? That's the first area I would improve first, before thinking poor sensitivity and selectivity.

 

[JvdK]

If you don’t need DMR or NXDN I think the UBC125AT would be your model. It’s verry sensitive and popular under civil and military airband listeners.

 

[cg]

I think the 780 was one of the best scanners Uniden produced. 785 & 796 a bit less so.
The 996XT and the original BC15 were the newer Uniden receivers that were real decent. The 996P2 and more recent 15X are OK but not as good of receivers.
There was also an internal filter chip replacement mod posted that 10+ years ago made the 996XT even better but was a surface mount component replacement and the new part was scarce.

 

[Ubbe]

The 780 are the only scanner with varicap tracking filters for the front-end that have a narrow bandwidth that follows the frequency while scanning. Modern scanners have fixed wide filters that covers a whole band, like 137-175MHz. A radio like the first version TYT MD380 also use tracking filters and have an excellent sensitivity.

It's mostly about trying to narrow down the frequency range that the receiver sees to make it sensitive and interference free. It also depends of you local RF interference situation. A sensitive scanner could degrade a lot if exposed to a lot of RF energy and a less sensitive scanner usually handles that much better and will receive better than that sensitive receiver. If you use an antenna that only receive well from a smaller frequency range and you also have some sort of filter to reduce what are received from other frequencies, then even a scanner like SDS100 can be used to receive weak signals.

/Ubbe