Airband Scanners and the Need For Speed!

This is something I've touched on with a recent post when comparing the Uniden UBC125XLT with the Yupiteru VT225 and that is the speed with which a scanner will scan its memory channels (search speed is also important when looking for new frequencies too).

Many scanners available today offer scan speeds in the region of 20-40 channels a second which may sound quite reasonable. I think some of the AOR, Icom and Alinco radios scan at these sort of speeds and I believe the older Yupiteru scanners are in the region of 30 cps (channels per second) and many of the radio Shack/Realistic radios such as the PRO 2042 are in the region of 40 cps.

As I say that may sound reasonable, but when you have perhaps say 500 memory channels stored (quite reasonable even for airband especially if your interest is military and civil) it would take a scanner doing 20 cps 25 SECONDS to get round to checking each channel again! and when you consider that transmissions are often very short particularly on military airband you can begin to see that it would be possible to completely miss a transmission without ever being aware of it and then you're left scratching your head trying to lock on to that aircraft and the frequency it's using, so SPEED REALLY IS IMPORTANT in what determines a good radio scanner for locking on to those signals!

This is one area the Uniden radios in particular seem to excel, the 125XLT I have at the moment for instance has a published scan speed of 80 cps and I can honestly say, I've never picked up as many transmissions as I now do on this radio.If it's within reception range, I'll hear it.

My next intended purchase is a dedicated home based scanner and I'll probably be looking at the Uniden BCT15X as this has a stated search and scan speed of 100cps! I appreciate this scanner is not for the faint hearted as it has 'dynamic memory allocation' which I'm not going to explain here but it's quite a steep learning curve compared with most scanners today but I'm pretty familiar with the Uniden radios now having previously owned a 3500XLT with dynamic memory allocation so I think I know what I'll be doing with it so watch this space. Once I manage to get hold of one, I'll post my opinions and experience with it on here!