Railfan Technology > Problem with Programable Scanner

This is a handheld, old 200 channel Radio Shack scanner that is deader than a doornail. I stored it without batteries in it and the contacts look good, but I get nothing out of it. I suppose I could clean the contacts and run a meter on it. Any ideas? The light wont light up so there is no power.

Victor Baird

Posted from Android



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/26 07:24 by wabash2800.

As my girlfriend would say: "Operator Error". The scanner takes four AA  batteries not two. There are two batteries in the radio and two in the battery compartment cover! duh. That's an easy fix but embarrassing.

Victor Baird



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/26 07:36 by wabash2800.

super cheap on ebay

For the sake of experimenting with old cludgy radios use a variable power supply to power it off the DC input or just the battery tabs, then you know if it works or not.

There are lots of battery replacement entreprenurs on EBay. They find old batery holders or print one up, or send them the old battery pack. Worked great on my old Uniden radio (s),

Messing around with old radios can be a fun hobby, but I generally don't recommend them for serious railfanning out in the field.  The old scanners are especially bothersome.  All of their "front end" filtering and tuning was build before narrow-banding of the frequency spectrum came along.  The "early" tunable scanners did not have great selectivity nor sensitivity, either.  They were built before the radio spectrum was absolutely jam-packed with outside RF interference.  So, using one of those scanners today is sort of analogous to hooking up an old black-and-white TV to your computer and expecting it to function well (if at all) as a computer monitor.

To show how things have progressed, allow me to illustrate with one of my "legacy" commercial portable radios, the venerable Kenwood TK-290.  This radio was the "flagship" portable radio used by the railroads for over 25 years.  A few are still out there in railroad use.  The TK-290 is a tough tank of an old-school "brick" radio.  It is almost double (or more) the size of its modern replacement radios.  But, in addition to size, the TK-290 does show its technological age.  The TK-290 has absolutely outstanding weak signal performance, as good or better than the best of my current generation of commercial portable radios,  BUT, its selectivity and unwanted RF rejection is not up to current standards.  It can be frustrating out in the field because of that.  So, it stays in my radio drawer most of the time.  I keep it just because it was my "go-to" radio for a couple of decades of railfanning--it has sentimental value.  But, for serious railfanning, I carry more modern radios.