Uniden BC355N 800 MHz 300-Channel Base/Mobile Scanner, Close Call RF Capture, Pre-programmed Search “Action” Bands to Hear Police, Ambulance, Fire, Amateur Radio, Public Utilities, Weather, and More, Black

I like the unit and added speaker. I did not like the Third Party Delivery (Fed Ex) Stated they left the package at the front door, but dropped it in wet grass (raining) approx. 1-2 feet from the busy road side. It could have been stolen, run over by a car or the postman of got wet enough to destroy the electrical unit.

Having worked in the news media for over 30 years I can tell you that Uniden scanners are used in a number of newsrooms. Having said that I can also tell you that if you are into listening to police calls, there might be a problem since a number of police agencies are on different frequencies that some scanners can not pick up. As hard as Ive tried I can not pick up the local police on my scanner because there are no buttons to push to a set frequency. So instead I listen to the fire and EMS calls. Just as interesting as police calls in my opinion.

Live three miles out of town and it will not pick anything

Good little radio, nice features easy to set up. Sound quality could be a little better but good radio over all.

Bought this for myself then decided to give it to my son for Christmas. WE have such a horrible fire season here in Northern Calif, every home needs a scanner to know what is going on around them.

I live in an area that still uses analog communications for emergency services, so I was looking for a simple scanner that I could program with a few banks. This scanner seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunately, it wasnt until I started to program it that I realized its massive flaw. I honestly dont understand how the designers of this scanners firmware could be so completely incompetent in their design. The police/fire/emergency banks along with air and marine are completely unusable if you are near any amount of traffic at all. The scanner is reported as 3 x 100 bank programmable, where 1 bank is Private 1 is Police/Fire/Emrg and 1 is air/marine. The issue is, the only way to scan programable banks for police/fire/emrg or air/marine is to enable the associated built in channels with those banks. There are almost 4000 channels that get scanned if you turn those on. Your programmable banks get scanned *after* those channels and at 100cps, thats a 20 second round trip. Whats even worse than that, is the scanner only has the ability to lock out 100 of those 4000 channels, so if you are near a city of any size it will hang constantly on digital signals that you cant disable. So what does this mean? Well you cant use a lot of the scanner and setup becomes very tedious. Police and air banks add almost 2000 channels each to your scan. This is slow and with only 100 lockouts you will never be able to filter out the noise in a busy area. If you enable fire/emrg (without police) you add about 300 channels and marine (without air) only adds about 90 and these will allow you to enable the other two private banks. I recommend enabling these and locking out everything local in the pre programmed banks and then adding the channels you want scanned into private, fire, and marine. This gives you control to enable/disable banks with 300 channels total and you should only have about 350 preprogrammed channels to contend with ( hopefully your 100 lockout limit will make these listenable in your area) WX and CB bands are fixed, so you get what you expect there. I dont recommend this scanner at all and I really cant believe it was built this way. A simple setting to turn off pre-programmed banks would make things so much easier.

Programming this thing is a nightmare.

In order to set channels (i have list of local frequencies) you can not enter frequencies directly. You have to select the band width to scan and then when to get close to your frequency hit hold then arrow up or down to lock in the channel into your private bank. Other wise you have to scan for channels manually to find local frequencies to lock into the private bank. That takes a lot of time. Also the internal speak is not very clear (tinny sounding) I used an external speak to plug into the jack (much loader and Clearer).

Bought this on the advice of a neighbor. Not disappointed but it takes sometime to figure out how to get the best programming out of it, but I do like that it’s portable as well. Thanks!