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

Had issues programming and had to you tube videos and Google to figure it out

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.

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

Is it a great scanner? No. Is it a decent scanner in an area with only analog comms? Definitely. Dont expect the world from it, but it works well for what it is.

Worst part of this review is for the shipping. Received it quickly, however the packing was the worst! Scanner itself is in a box protected only by cardboard. That box was placed into a much larger box, along with three outlet surge protectors and almost no packing material. All four items were free to bash into each other every time the box was moved. Amazingly, everything survived! The scanner itself is about what one would expect from a low-price radio. It has very few bells & whistles, but it covers the bands/modes I needed. This replaced a scanner with many more features, however it receives MUCH better than the older one! It lacks a headphone jack and a Priority channel, and its small size and light weight make it a little harder for fat fingers to work the buttons without pushing it off the desk! That said, it was worth the few dollars it costs!

It came on time it works I am still working on getting some of the channels I live down the road 1 to 2 minutes from my local frie department have not been able to pick them up but can pick up other fire department far away

The product information mentioned battery charging capability but this does not have battery charging capability you have to keep it plugged in the outlet at all times

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

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.

I really wanted to like this scanner. I bought it to replace another Uniden that I had 20+ years ago. I live in an area where our public safety uses digital trunked systems. Not a problem, as I only purchased it to monitor air, marine, rail, and ham traffic in the area. Sadly, this scanner just doesnt fit my needs and is being returned. I really did not like how the memory channels were allocated and how you had to go through the entire band, air for example, BEFORE the unit would scan the small handful of air frequencies you programmed. In all honesty, this radio only has 100 programmable channels that are functional. The other 200 are useless. Those 100 usable channels in the Private bank cannot be broken out into subsections. So, all the frequencies you want to monitor need to be stored there, and not in the service banks. As far as overall quality and audio output, the scanner is a nice compact package and sounds really good. Buyer beware...