Bearcat 5 - Any worth?

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Jay911

Silent Key (April 15th, 2023)
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Hi all,

My employer has at least one if not a couple of Bearcat 5 receivers. (In actual fact I suspect they have a ton of them, as every firehall used to have one - but I only know of the location of one or two.) They're crystal scanners with 8 channel slots (5 are presently used in the one I have access to). Of those 5 channels, 4 are no longer in use. All are in the 413/418 mhz range.

Does anyone have specs on this radio (i.e. frequency coverage, etc)? I can only find an image on the web, and virutally no text/HTML. Is there anything worthwhile I can do with this thing? I don't expect it to be able to handle our 800mhz Smartzone trunk, or even the conventional repeater/simplex channels in the same system. However, there's tons of frequencies from 150.0 to 174 and 403 to 430 that would be nice to have in the dispatch center, that we don't have in our radios.

I realize that a BC796D or something else would be much easier and efficient, but I doubt that I could get money released for such a purchase, and besides, my point is to find out if the old BC5 is worth keeping around when we move in a few months.

Thanks all :)
 
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