RadioBanter - What do meople pean when they talk about "dynamic range, 25,000 frequencies, digital scanner?"

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:45:53 -0500, Jack Newhouse
wrote:

Do I still have to type in frequencies one at a time with the best new
scanners like the uniden 396XT, The English scanner, and the GRE?

What is the difference between a digital scanner and an analog one?
Why is one better than the other?

How is it possible to have thousands of channels available?

Someone splain dat for me please. :-)
The number of frequencies is pure marketing BS. If a scanner can
receive from 100 kHz to 2000 MHz in 10 kHz steps, that is 1999.9 MHz x
100 steps per megahertz = 199,990 frequencies! Of course, old radios
with a tuning dial were "better" becasue they could tune an infinite
number of channels.

The other two parts of your question have more meaningful answers.
Dynamic Range is a measure of how wide of a range of signal strength a
radio can handle. A wider range means it can hear weak signal as well
as strong ones. That is not as easy as it sounds since strong signals
can cause distortion or overload the scanner and cause all sort of
problems even when listening to other nearby frequencies.

Digital vs Analog isn't referring to the whether the components in the
scanner are digital or analog, but whether the scanner is designed to
received both analog and the newer digital transmissions. You ask
which is better? Only you can answer that. If you want to hear
digital transmissions, you need a digital scanner. If not, an older
analog scanner will do.