wrote in message
oups.com...
As I mentioned, nobody knew anything about it at Fry's. I asked the
whole department, but nobody who knew anything. If I knew the unit
was
good I would have put more time and effort in it. The manual doesn't
provide any basic setup steps. Goes rimmediately into describing the
systems: trunking, digital, etc... I did experiment for almost half
a

You can't expect the people at a big box electronics store to be
knowledgeable about scanners. These are not like computers. They're a
tiny part of the market. You aren't likely to find a
knowledgeable geek at the store or living a few houses down the
street.

The Radio Shack and Bearcat scanner manuals I've seen are dreadful.
They're fairly complete, but the information is badly organized. It's
fortunate that I have a background in electronics. I feel sorry for
newbies who don't have that advantage.

It just happens that I have the BCD396T manual on my computer, since
I've been thinking about buying one. Reading that manual is no walk in
the park, even for somebody with experience in the hobby. The 396 is a
marvelously advanced scanner, but when you combine its sophistication,
and the poor manual, and a scanning novice, the result will probably
be trouble. With a good deal of determination, I believe you could
eventually learn it, though.

The web is a good resource, but take the info with a grain of salt.
For example, I just went to the radioreference.com site and looked up
my county. Maybe a third of the listed freqs are any good at all where
I live.
Some of the info is outdated, but much of it's probably correct. Just
because a freq is used *somewhere* in the county, doesn't mean it's
audible *everywhere* in
county.

When your search did pick some traffic, did you stop,
monitor that frequency for awhile, and (if it was interesting) put
that frequency in a channel? Once you have some channels loaded,
switch from search mode to scan mode. Now the scanner checks only
those channels. You get a lot more action because the scanner isn't
wasting time checking all possible frequencies.

What part of the frequency spectrum did you search? If you simply
search the full range of the scanner, it'll spend a lot of time
tediously plowing through freqs where there's little to be found. Most
of the good stuff is in the 148-174 and 450-512 MHz bands (or maybe
450-470, since I think 470-512 has TV in some areas).

--
Paul Hirose
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