In article , visa365
@aol.com says...
i want to use it for utility purposes...long range !

The Optoelectronics Scout will only lock on to a frequency if it's 15dB
stronger than background RF levels. In a typical urban area you need to
be pretty close to most sources for the Scout to lock on. Mine used to
light up from a pager tower about a mile away, but that thing was
putting out quite the signal. In most cases you need to be within a few
hundred feet. For low power devices, like cordless phones, you need to
be pretty much right on top of it. With my old 49MHz phone I had to
have the Scout within one foot.

In a low RF rural situation I would imagine the detection distance would
go up considerably.

It's a very useful device, but you do need to be within fairly close
range of most signals for it to register on the Scout. If you don't
care about being stealthy, a large antenna tuned to your target
frequency range will help quite a lot. A combination of low pass and
high pass filters can also improve the range by eliminating the
competing background RF.

-- Jay