Radio Shuffle - Part 2: Brand New Toy

The story with my handheld scanners starts with the Uniden Bearcat BC250D I bought last August. I bought it when I did because I wanted a second handheld for the Toledo Airshow, and I wanted to have a "scanner for the future" that could do digital. Some "scanner for the future" it turned out to be...it turns out that it could only decode a kind of first phase of digital transmission for agencies that still had analog radios in their inventories. When agencies went 100% digital, they switched to a mode the BC250D couldn't understand. Uniden quickly made a new scanner to cover this mode and just as quickly dropped the BC250D and stopped supporting it.

To make a long story longer, I had to get rid of the Bearcat. It quite possibly took the quickest route to obsolesence of any item I'd ever owned. Luckily for me, not everyone realizes the thing was obsolete (for those systems not digital or trunked, it's perfectly fine)...last week I sold it on eBay for $30 more than I paid for it.

I decided I would replace it with two handheld scanners, using the money from selling the Bearcat and eventually selling the Sony shortwave. I decided I wanted a Radio Shack Pro-97 and at some point later one of Uniden's new digital offerings.

Enter the Pro-97:



I just bought it this afternoon. This scanner's role is my interim "do everything" handheld until I get the Uniden, and my airshow scanner after that. It has many neat features...it will do just about everything except digital. It will track Toledo's trunked Public Safety radio system, it covers all the weather band frequencies and has a quick key to access the Skywarn amateur radio storm spotter frequencies, and it will search all marine and CB radio channels, to name just a few things. It also covers all civilian and military air frequencies, and has a rapid search frequency counter that will detect any nearby source of RF energy as long as it is on a frequency covered by the scanner. This is what will make it a great airshow scanner!

I'm still undecided on which Uniden digital I'll get. There's the BC296D, which was their quick replacement for the BC250D. It's been around for about a year, and is breathtakingly expensive. There's the BCD396T, which is expected to arrive this fall with about every feature imaginable. It is expected to debut for around the same price as the 296 is now (which should make the 296's price plummet). Then there's another project that Uniden will announce on May 19 that has enthusiasts abuzz...but nobody is sure what the project is. Because of this volatility in Uniden's product lineup, I've decided to play it safe and wait until everything falls in place before buying my second handheld.