Uniden BCD996P2 Digital Mobile TrunkTracker V Scanner, 25,000 Dynamically Allocated Channels, Close Call RF Capture Technology, 4-Line Alpha display, Base/Mobile Design, Phase 2, Location-Based Scanning

Its a good scanner but I wasnt able to get it programmed so I returned it. Check around your area to see if anyone you know can help you if you have a problem like I did. Its not the scanners fault that I couldnt figure it out. The WX channel came in loud and clear. :) This was the best price that I could find.

Nice radio but too difficult to program. Actually had to contact third party to purchase software to program the radio. I will probably get it programmed but if asked. I wouldn’t purchase this again.

A strong addition to anyones scanner development program

Got for father in law to keep up

Would not recommend for a beginner

This is an excellent scanner, as you would expect from Uniden Bearcat. Ive been using scanners for 35 years, and this is a good one. It has plenty of options and can store more frequencies than most people will ever use. This scanner is not organized in the traditional way (e.g. banks of frequencies); it is ordered in Systems/Sites/Groups, which handles memory better but that appears to be the only advantage. The major limitation of this unit is the owners manual. It was clearly written by engineers with no editing or useful organization. It looks like about 30 people wrote different sections of the manual, and none of them coordinated with the others. The manual is difficult to follow, and presumes the reader is a tech-head engineer. The manual contains less-then-helpful comments such as if you really want to confuse yourself - no kidding thats actually in there! As you read along, trying to figure out how to program a simple frequency, you will find headings that say refer to Creating Sites and Creating Groups. Finally, refer to Programming Frequencies/IDs. Great, but it doesnt tell you where those sections are in the manual, and to make sure you cant find them, the section headings are repeated over and over and over and over and over again in multiple contexts that are nearly impossible to follow. The manual is and absolute stream-of-consciousness. I was a software engineer for 12 years, so I will get this unit programmed, but I would most definitely not buy it again. If Id known the manual was such a disaster, I would have purchased a different unit.

Ive been into scanners since I was a kid in college. My first one was a desktop Regency analog scanner. Since then, Ive had 4 other scanners, Uniden and Radio Shack, analog and digital. Unfortunately, my previous digital scanner only picked up P25 Phase I, and most of the PDs in my county have moved to P25 Phase II. These digital scanners arent cheap, which kept me away for many years, but I finally decided to take the plunge again with this Uniden BCD996P2. Ive had no problems manually programming my previous scanners, so I didnt think this one would be too difficult. Programming conventional analog frequencies was fairly easy. But trying to set up a digital trunked system was more difficult than I thought. I think mostly this is because the instruction manual is not very clearly written or logically organized. Watching YouTube videos did little to help. After several hours, and much trial and error, things finally started making sense and I finally did figure it out. But because of how slow and tedious it is to navigate the menus and enter alpha tags etc, it would take me weeks, if not months to manually program everything I want to listen to. In the end, I decided to save myself a lot of time and headache and to avoid needlessly wearing out the buttons, I got the $15 subscription to Radio Reference and used the Freescan software to upload everything I need into my scanner from my computer. In less than an hour, my scanner was all set up. Instead of spending a lot of time toiling over programming the scanner, Im spending my time enjoying it, so I think it was worth it. Aside from the programming aspect and the confusing instruction manual, the scanner itself is great. The digital transmissions come in clear. The analog signals, such as on the air band, will be staticky. It has a lot of other nice features, can change the color of the display backlight, set up weather alerts, pre-programmed searches, such as FM radio, CB radio, FRS channels, and a bunch of features I will probably never use like connecting to a GPS. After many years of missing out, Im glad I can finally hear whats going on again.

So I am a newbie to this hobby and decided to buy a scanner just to see what was going on whenever the city fire alarm goes off and to listen to police chatter in my free time. After a few days of research I settled on this model even though there were a lot of people saying it was extremely hard to program....Yes it is without help but I programmed all the local ones I needed thanks to a few you tube videos, freescan and radio reference . Took a few hours to learn how to block unwanted channels and other useful things but wasnt too bad. You can pretty much throw away the directions Uniden sent with it and just you tube or google everything. Product came early and as described.

Ive had more experience with Whistler/Grecom so I was curious to try a Uniden. This is their flagship mobile/desktop scanner unless you want their dumbed-down Home Patrol version. Im impressed with the RF performance but the digital P25 performance is relatively poor. P25 calls range from mildly garbled to nearly unintelligible. The BCD992P2 also has trouble following P25 communications often truncating or completely muting the audio. For those who think Im just being hard on Uniden, a Whistler 1098 on the same discone antenna has done FAR better delivering intelligible audio on the exact same traffic. There are also multiple YouTube videos documenting the same thing. Im also disappointed in all the missing features and weird user interface of the Uniden. Whos bright idea was it to define everything around Quick Keys apparently just to be different? A Whistler can log hit counts into the scanner memory while you just let it scan for days if you want. You can then easily sort for the most active channels. That seems a bit too advanced for Unidens firmware people as I havent found any equivalent feature. The Freescan software will log hits on your PC but you cant use the resulting list to edit anything directly in the scanner. For analog use this seems to perform similarly to my Whistler scanners and might have somewhat better RF performance (less susceptible to overload/intermod). For digital it seems to really struggle. And, regardless, the user interface, programming, etc. is generally less intuitive and less capable. Uniden vs Whistler each have their advantages and disadvantages. For me, Unidens poor digital performance and arcane user interface make it the inferior choice. Uniden needs to at least match Whistlers digital performance and come up with a user interface that doesnt seem like it was designed by aliens from another planet.

I received it late because of UPS. It is a little hard too program even with free scan and radio reference. I recommend finding a local person that can fully program it if you are not tech savvy. It gets very good reception with stock antenna, and squelch is easy to control. The sound is good volume great. It has the capability to receive more channels under more bands than you can count. From ham, gmrs, public analog, trucnked ect... It is ruggedly built, metal not plastic. It reminds one of the good quality from the 1970-1980 era. Buttons are easy to operate with positive feel. It is expensive, but seems well worth the cost as it has all the features needed to listen to all the local and federal channels within about 150 miles and a little more. It also picks up some aircraft bands. Go ahead and buy it, you will be pleased with it.