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

This is a hard review to write. I purchased this because as a CERT responder I wanted to know what was going on the Police, Fire, and Emergency channels. But so far the only channel I have received anything on is the Weather channel. I live near a large city in Southern Utah so it isnt like I am somewhere out in the boonies. Maybe the police, fire, and emergency people use a different range of frequencies than this radio is tuned for. I cant complain about the radio, but I am disappointed that I cant get the broadcasts I was hoping for.

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.

It does scan all 1700 available frequencies so its a little slow you miss a lot of the back and forth. It has amazing range i can pick up services 20 + miles away but I miss the local stuff cause I cant lock in only those channels. And yes you can save them in favorites but it scans them after making the the full sweep of the 1700 possible channels. Also go for the larger extension speaker the little speaker built in is a little small for the job. But all in all for the price you can hear all available channels , and it does come with everything you need to plug and play right out of the box.

I convinced myself to upgrade to this Uniden scanner to replace my old & outdated Uniden BC350C 50 channel scanner. I bought this scanner because I needed more programmable channel space for my important frequencies other than just 50 channels which was all that my old scanner had or would let me program. When I received this scanner, I was quite happy getting ready to set it up & receive 250 more programmable channels & space for frequencies than my old, outdated Uniden scanner had. Once I got it set up & started programming my frequencies, I ran into a bad downgrade issue that I was not aware of when I purchased it. The downgrade of this scanner: It will let you program up to 300 frequencies into it as described but the real catch to this is that you can only program up to 100 channels/frequencies into the best & most useful bank on this scanner being the(Private) Bank but not 300 like I was expecting to be able to program into the (Private) bank. The other 200 programmable channels are only available in the following shared banks: PD/FD/EMG & AIR/MRN. What this means is that if you need to program more than 100 channels/frequencies onto this scanner, youll have to program the other +100 of your scanner frequencies into these other shared banks/categories which then means that you cannot just listen to your own private/important frequencies that you have programmed in these shared banks on this scanner... You will in fact have to hear & listen to everything else that is going on under these Bank categories too which to me is nothing but a terrible annoyance. If you are like me, you may only want to hear & listen to your chosen programmed frequencies & not everything else too like, when the scanner gets stuck on a blank frequency with pure Black noise in the PD/FD/EMG or AIR/MRN Banks every 10 seconds & wont stop until you come & lock it out on the scanner. This means that you may not even hear anything that is going on with your important programmed frequencies in these other two Banks because there will be too much other noise & things going on under these shared banks/categories for you to hear anything that is going on with your programmed frequencies that you needed or wanted to program & listen to for your purposes. I expected for this scanner to let me program all of my important frequencies into the one bank that is most important & the most useful on this scanner. Again that is the (Private) bank which I thought it would let me program 300 channels/frequencies into that specific bank. That was not the case but instead only holds 100 channels/frequencies in this useful (Private) bank. Bummer this was to me to find this out!! (:-(

I program scanners all the time and I needed the manual for this one. It is not very easy to use and very tedious to program. I bought it to monitor 3 specific local analog frequencies and because of its small form factor. For my purposes, it’s adequate. However, even for beginners, spend a few extra few dollars as there are much more capable, and less frustrating, entry-level scanners available from Uniden.

The BC355N is perfect for those who desire a simple easy to setup and operate radio. Ability to key pad frequencies into unit would make it a 5++. I have owned a significant number of radios over the years and must say this is a great unit for the $. I will also say that a scanner is only as good as the Antenna which is attached to it so before you give up on a radio add a better antenna first. Phil Tee Staten Island NY

Programming this thing is a nightmare.

Bought one for my daughter and one for my son and one for my own present. A great scanner at a reasonable price. Easy to use, but real professional ability to program by reading the detailed manual. We live in Lake County, CA where we need to have them to keep track of the wildfires in our area, as well as weather forecasts, police and sheriff, and ambulance calls.

I purchased this scanner because it has a private bank i.e.; you can program your favorite frequencies into this band, and turn off all other banks. The private bank only holds 100 frequencies. This might be an issue if you live in or near a very large city. Its not an issue for me, and probably not for most people. Programming wasnt all that hard to figure out. Just follow the instructions in the owners manual. It has a weather band and has all 7 NOAA bands. Scanner comes with a telescoping antenna, and uses a standard BNC connector. It has a frequency lock out feature. Permanent and temporary. Turbo search (180 steps per second). 7 banks total. 6 pre-programmed 1 private band. Close call i.e.; checks for strong nearby signals while monitoring other frequencies. This is a great feature when you are monitoring a band that has some activity but not a lot. Im not going to use it as a mobile device, but it comes with everything you would need to go mobile, including a window mount antenna. Scanner does not have internal battery backup. I guess if you loose your house power, you can plug it into your vehicle. Use an external speaker. Ive owned several scanners and all their internal speakers pretty much suck. Ive had this scanner for 2 months, and overall, Im very satisfied.

I wanted a scanner for a long time. I use to pull up radio reference and listen to the stream of my local police traffic but the quality was bad and unreliable. This scanner appealed to be because I wanted one like this style, not the portable radio looking ones, as well as the feature of being able to use it in the home and car. It took me a little while to figure out how to use it even with the instructions but after 10-20 minutes I had my local sheriffs dept. tuned in. I was so happy, the quality was 100x better than the internet stream, it sounded like they were right next to me compared to what the stream sounded like. I was impressed by the amount of accessories that were included with the scanner. Most companies would require you to purchase all the stuff that was included with this. There was a car antenna, a house antenna, AC adapter, DC adapter, and a hard wire kit for the car. I purchased a different antenna for the top of the car as well as a speaker. The only wish I have is that it went a little louder, when your in the car and driving at 60-75 MPH its hard to hear with the road noise. If you have it you can plus your AUX in for your car and have it come across your speakers but itll only come out of one side. I dont know anything about scanners but Im 100% happy with my purchase. Its something Ive wanted for a long time and it does exactly what I wanted. Dont be discouraged if you have trouble figuring it out at first. The instructions dont cover everything so you sort of have to teach yourself some things.