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 receiver was purchased to replace a mid-80s BearCat 20/20 scanner that had provided outstanding service for nearly 35 years. Unfortunately, the BC355N does not measure up to the high standard set by its much older sibling. The audio is weak and the optional BC23A amplified speaker is required if you want to hear an intelligible broadcast from across the hangar (40 feet). On the plus side, reception with an external VHF antenna is very good.

This works great if you dont need to scan bands. The stock antenna it comes with works well right out of the box, and i was able to monitor my municipality (fire dept) on a single channel after about 3 zillion hours with the manual... So other than the fact that this thing is more complicated than the Hubble telescope to use and despite having a tech degree and being a reasonably geeky fellow I still cant figure out the scanning feature - it works. If you are easily frustrated by technology, you might want to opt for something a bit more user friendly.

Although this scanner is compact and seems senitive, it is poorly designed. It claims to be 300 channels, BUT this is misleading. 100 channels are shared between Marine Band and Aircraft. In order to use these channels you must let it scan through the pre-programmed frequencies first. On aircraft that means it takes 27 seconds before you even get to your frequencies. In my case, all 27 seconds were dead channels. The same is true for Police &Fire except there are many more pre-programmed frequencies to scan through. If you turn these banks off you can only scan 100 channels. Unless you are willing to use this as a 100 channel scanner, the wait time of going through thousands of dead frequencies is ginormus! You better have the patience of a saint.

I bought this for my local fire department and ems communications to listen to in my vehicle and when I get home. The sound quality is amazing and it is really easy to set up with the right support from YouTube videos!

Nicely packed, came with everything described even had extras. Great purchase

It is hard to figure out the search and scan. I read the manual several times and i am still confused. also cant figure out if it has a channel priority and it scans really slow.

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.

Definitely need to know about scanners before buying one. The new platforms are not like 20 years ago! Some changes have happened but now makes things more difficult for home listening. With me being in the fire department I enjoy having a at hime scanner and a pager but I wanted a base at home one instead of having my portable sitting and getting knocked over. This will pick some about 4% of my local fire ems police channels. On the police side I can only get 1 and it wont stop with the static!!! I was able to pick up 3 or 4 other fire and ems but like 1 call not every call so that part I dont understand. Come to find out this scanner doesnt pick but BOTH digital and antilog

I wanted a scanner that I could use at my home, as well as at my tiny cabin (where 12 volt solar is my only power source), and this product proved to be perfect for this application. Granted, it only receives analog signal, but for my area (Central Missouri), that is all that I need to stay on top of things. It receives all of my local police, fire, and EMS, both dispatch and mobile just fine. I really like the ability to switch to the other bands this scanner receives, such as air and marine. The only reason I didnt give it 5 stars, is due to the fact that the manual is difficult to understand, however, you can watch a few Youtube videos to get the idea, and after that it is pretty easy. Just a couple of helpful hints. If you program your local frequencies into private mode, you will get much better performance by deselecting all options other than private mode, and if you want to listen to any of the other bands, then just select the particular band of your choice, and deselect the private band, because if you try to scan too many bands at once, you will miss out on a lot, because there is a lot going on the airwaves, and you can only listen to one frequency at a time. Finally, a good tip for programming locals into private mode, is to go to broadcastify.com, and select the area you want to listen to. Broadcastify will allow you to listen to broadcasts in your area. Next, begin a search of scanner frequencies for your area, programming them into the scanner. Unless there are any trunked frequencies, you should hear the scanner talk when broadcastify talks. I hope this is easy to understand as it is relatively easy to do. All in all, I am very happy with this product, it does what I need it to do.

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!! (:-(