What's the best Scanner for Bay Area

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cdmercier

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For those who live in the Bay Area which Uniden scanner would you recommend for listening to the police departments, CHP and fire departments? I was looking at the BCD996T but I don't want to spend the full $500 if its not required for this area.
 

lorin

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Buy a GRE psr-600. It is the best on the market and next year all public safety will be going to 760 Mhz Trunk system. This scanner receives the best for trunk. Starting July 09 Santa Clara County AMR Amb and Santa Clara City Fire/PD will be moving. Soon after that the rest of the County will move to it. It has updatable firmware so you will always will up to date for any new sytems that come out.
 

trooperdude

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For those who live in the Bay Area which Uniden scanner would you recommend for listening to the police departments, CHP and fire departments? I was looking at the BCD996T but I don't want to spend the full $500 if its not required for this area.

I have the 996T with the latest firmware for 700mhz and rebanded 800mhz systems and the remote head kit in my vehicle, and I've been extremely happy with it.

I think it's a good value for the $$$$

A digital scanner is pretty much required for the future in the Bay Area.

For CHP and Fire you can get away with a conventional analog scanner for most applications.

I'm not fond of the GRE PSR's because the screens are too small. Especially for mobile applications.

YMMV
 

trooperdude

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Eng74

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Well in San Francisco the GRE PSR-600 can get overloaded really bad. I have both the 600 and 996 both work well in different areas there. The 600 will can get SFFD all the way in Foster City and the 996 not a bar same for the 2096 that the 600 replaced.
 

SCPD

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I like the PSR-600 so much I bought a second one to install in our "out of town" car (the one we use to travel). San Francisco has been using a digital "Smartzone" Motorola trunking system for about 5 years now. As the FCC narrow band deadline of 2013 approaches expect to see more agencies/whole counties in the Bay Area employ similar systems. This is true in most of the large metro areas in the U.S. as well. The PSR-600 is capable of narrow band operation right now and the low cost radios are not, even the new ones being sold, and they can't be upgraded to do so. The purchase of one of the $500 models right now will save money in the long run.

The PSR-600 has a great feature that I'm finding very useful, really essential right now. Some agencies are already employing narrow band radio systems so they will be compliant with the upcoming narrow band requirement. When you have a mixture of narrow and wide band signals the volume needed to hear the narrow band signals will blast you out of the room when a wide band frequency is received. The PSR-600 has a channel by channel option of employing an "audio boost." Using that on the narrow band channels allows you to set the volume to a level where you can hear both. In my neck of the woods I am always scanning the feds, whose narrow band mandate started in 2005. I had to sit next to the radio and adjust the volume so the CHP would not blast me out of my seat while just barely being able to hear my favorite federal agencies. I often found myself frequently adjusting the volume and this made listening further than 5 feet from the scanner impossible. The PSR-600 allowed me to listen from other rooms and over the remote speaker in my garage.

The narrow band requirement coming up in 2013 does not just affect the public safety portion of the land Mobile radio service, but business use as well. VHF/UHF ham radio is the only portion of the land mobile service without this upcoming mandate. Listening to most radio services will be problematic with an older scanner after 2013.

Whether you buy a Uniden or a GRE/Radio Shack scanner is somewhat like the Coke and Pepsi thing. However, most agree that the digital audio on the GRE scanners is better. Whether the upcoming new Uniden scanner model will change this is not known right now. For me I had mostly Unidens until the PRO-92 came out. Since then I've stuck to the GRE manufactured scanners including the PRO-2067, PRO-96, and PSR-600 with only one exception. One reason is that the StarrSoft programming applications allow me to transfer data between the files for each model. That saves a huge amount of time when I write and revise files for each scanner.

I was hugely disappointed with the BC-780 scanner I purchased for base station use sometime around 2003 or 2004 and the PRO-2052 Uniden manufactured base station I bought in 1999 or 2000. I still have my BC-210 and three BC-760's in use around my house and in one vehicle. The BC-760's was one of the best scanners ever made, but then my PRO-2006 has been regarded as the best scanner ever made. I really like the BC-235, the first trunk tracking scanner, I purchased in 1995 or 1996. A great little radio, but without narrow band, digital, and alphanumeric capability. Those scanners work well in my local, mostly non-trunked, listening area, but in the Bay Area would not be too useful.

One thing that can probably be agreed on by everyone is to stick with one brand or another as much as possible. I'm very comfortable with the StarrSoft software and the operation of the GRE scanners as each new model is not a huge change from the last one except for some new features. This makes the learning curve shorter and a whole lot less challenging for me.
 

dougr1252

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next year all public safety will be going to 760 Mhz Trunk system. ...Starting July 09 Santa Clara County AMR Amb and Santa Clara City Fire/PD will be moving. Soon after that the rest of the County will move to it.

The links for SVRIP don't talk about a new 760 Mhz trunk system. Anything more specific you could point to?
 

lorin

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The links for SVRIP don't talk about a new 760 Mhz trunk system. Anything more specific you could point to?

SVRIP does not list them because no one has been issued the freq's yet. Santa Clara Co. will get 57 channels in the 760 mhz. We are moving forward without any assistance from Fema.

Starting July 09 Santa Clara County AMR Amb and Santa Clara City Fire/PD will be moving. Soon after that the rest of the County will move to it. You are correct on that post! We are planning to have the whole county on 760 mhz by the end of 2009 with most other bay area counties following suit.



Thanks

Lorin
 

dougr1252

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The links for SVRIP don't talk about a new 760 Mhz trunk system. Anything more specific you could point to?

SVRIP does not list them because no one has been issued the freq's yet. Santa Clara Co. will get 57 channels in the 760 mhz. We are moving forward without any assistance from Fema.

Starting July 09 Santa Clara County AMR Amb and Santa Clara City Fire/PD will be moving. Soon after that the rest of the County will move to it. You are correct on that post! We are planning to have the whole county on 760 mhz by the end of 2009 with most other bay area counties following suit.



Thanks

Lorin

Will San Jose be moving on to that system also?
 

kma371

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Buy a GRE psr-600. It is the best on the market and next year all public safety will be going to 760 Mhz Trunk system. This scanner receives the best for trunk. Starting July 09 Santa Clara County AMR Amb and Santa Clara City Fire/PD will be moving. Soon after that the rest of the County will move to it. It has updatable firmware so you will always will up to date for any new sytems that come out.


Not all public safety will be going to a 760mhz trunked system next year, please don't misinform new members.

San Leandro uses alamedas trunked system, so a 996/396 or psr will do the job. It also depends what you want to listen to in order to pick the right one. Psrs do better on P25 than unidens.
 

cousinkix1953

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VHF/UHF ham radio is the only portion of the land mobile service without this upcoming mandate. Listening to most radio services will be problematic with an older scanner after 2013.
That's exactly what I told somebody the other day; when they asked me about Christmas shopping for a scanner. You might hear the CB buddies shootin skip on the Pro 2006 too and not much else.

Whether you buy a Uniden or a GRE/Radio Shack scanner is somewhat like the Coke and Pepsi thing. However, most agree that the digital audio on the GRE scanners is better.
So maybe that's why listening to the LAPD's digital radios on the internet sound just like the upper part of the 11 meter band. Some of those guys sound like they're using a modern CB radio on USB / LSB with a locked clarifier and everybody is slightly out of center tune. On the other hand the San Diego system sounds almost as good as analog FM.

SVRIP does not list them because no one has been issued the freq's yet. Santa Clara Co. will get 57 channels in the 760 mhz. We are moving forward without any assistance from Fema.
Santa Clara county will be listed in the FCC's official license records when the time comes. We can link to it from here too...
 

SCPD

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For those who live in the Bay Area which Uniden scanner would you recommend for listening to the police departments, CHP and fire departments? I was looking at the BCD996T but I don't want to spend the full $500 if its not required for this area.

Right now, I'm using a RS Pro-97 - which is monitoring Alameda County TRS (including San Leandro), Oakland Public Safety EDACS TRS, a handful of conventional East Bay PD channels, Richmond/San Pablo TRS, AC Transit (not sure why??), CHP, BART TRS, San Quentin (when I'm close to it), and a local refinery (because I work there).

I can tell you that trying to listen to more than one or two of these at once is impractical. So, mostly I monitor ALCO exclusively, the refinery while at work, CHP when driving in the rain (to avoid accidents ahead), and the rest when I'm in the area.

Good luck!
 

lorin

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Not all public safety will be going to a 760mhz trunked system next year, please don't misinform new members. Correct not all. However, All of Santa Clara County is moving along with most bay area counties, I saw a list of around 13 counties ( all northern calif. ) moving to 760 mhz.

Thanks

Lorin
 

trooperdude

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Not all public safety will be going to a 760mhz trunked system next year, please don't misinform new members. Correct not all. However, All of Santa Clara County is moving along with most bay area counties, I saw a list of around 13 counties ( all northern calif. ) moving to 760 mhz.

Thanks

Lorin

What you saw was merely the approved channel plan for this region.

I have several copies of this myself.

It doesn't mean that the counties will be going to 700mhz anytime soon.

The federal grant funds for Santa Clara County so far only cover the microwave links and the CAD integration. Not subscriber units and trunking systems.

I still think it's a ways off. Especially with the economy tanking.
 

trooperdude

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OK, I dug around and turned up more info on this. Region 6 RPC has allocated channels out of the State license at 769-775 MHz to the counties in Northern Cal. Nothing is in use yet AFAIK. I put the table data in a wiki since there's no place for it in the DB at this point:

http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Northern_California_700_MHz_Frequency_Assignments

Maybe a wiki whiz can suggest a fancier way of doing this.

They won't go into the database until they are licensed.

I have them broken out into individual excel spreadsheets by county, but I'm trying to figure out if we even want them in the wiki, or just a link to the .pdf document.
 

dougr1252

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I look at this stuff as just a heads-up for what we might see, but the repacking plans typically become reality. As you say it's not licensed or on the air, so it's not appropriate for the DB yet.
 
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