Railfan Technology > Best cheapest scanner?

what is the best cheapest scanner?

upheritage6 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> what is the best cheapest scanner?

For what slides or to listen to police fire railfanning

The words "Best" and "Cheapest" don't go together...
cf7

Exactly!

You get what you paid for, either type of scanner.

For the radio side, if you want to listen to railroad which are still analog you can probably get a good scanner in the $150 price range for less.

If you want to also listen to police, fire, EMS, etc., most of those systems have gone P25 digital and it will cost you close to $500.

Same goes for the NXDN digital that the railroads are going to.

I work for an engineering firm that designs radio systems and it's sometimes hard to explain that to our clients.

Pat
South Austin, TX
WA5VRO

Uniden Bearcat BC125AT radio for about $130.

When are the railroads going to digital? If I buy a digital scanner can I still hear the analog channels? If I buy an analog scanner can I hear the digital channels?

I have not heard a complete time frame for the railroads switching to NXDN digital. Since I work with some of the various radio manufacture sales persons they don't know the time frame.

Currently there is no scanner being manufactured that will receive NXDN. One major reason is the licensing for the NXDN decoder.

I think that the best option is plan to purchase either a Icom or Kenwood NXDN radio. I am looking a purchasing a NXDN mobile and handheld radio. In talking to the radio manufacturers, I am looking at spending between $450 to close to $550 for the NXDN radios depending on the features that I want.

Pat
WA5VRO
South Austin, TX

It's going to be a VERY long time before NXDN is required for RR services...Just as it will be a very long time before very narrowband (6.25khz) radio spec's are mandated.

Even with the recent narrowband FCC regs, just about any analog scanner will still work fine (the audio level will be a bit lower when listen to a narrowband transmission that the older 25khz bandpass).

No, you can NOT hear digital signals with an analog radio. Yes, most digital radios can receive analog signals.

The cheaper the (analog) scanner, the less desirable the technical spec's, such as sensitivity and selectivity.

A radio with high sensitivity but with marginal to poor selectivity will have intermodulation problems on adjacent channels. In other words the scanning might stop on a certain channel when in fact the actual Rf transmission is on an adjacent channel, and the scanner will stop scanning and yet have enough signal slop over to open the squelch circuit but the signal will be just a fuzzy mush. Not such a problem if the radio is manually tuned to just one channel and not in scanning mode. Plastic case radios are subject to more interference than higher quality radios with a full or partial metal chassis that provide better shielding...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/14 22:31 by WP707.