A Complicated Scanner with a Few Flaws

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lots of features, 2500 channels.

Cons: Difficult to program, poorly laid out keypad.

The Bottom Line: 
This is a difficult to program and hard to use scanner. From a company like Uniden I honestly expected more.

Author's Review
Here is it... one of Uniden's most advanced, most expensive, and theoretically best handheld scanners. However, the complexity of trying to program the scanner and a few design flaws make using this scanner a bit difficult.

My History
I assume that if you're reading this epinion you already have a good idea about what scanning is all about and how it works. I've owned and used various Uniden and Radio Shack scanners for over 15 years. I have a good handle on how to find frequencies, program scanners, and use scanners efficiently. When my father in law received a BC246T scanner for his birthday he asked me to program it for him

Setup and Programming
Almost immediately I realized that programming the 246 was going to be a relatively painful task. Don't bother trying to program a channel in manually with the scanner itself... without the computer software you'll drive yourself crazy. Just for kicks I tried to program a conventional channel into the scanner using the scanner itself and eventually gave up trying after about 5 minutes of getting nowhere.

The software available from Uniden is nice, but it comes with a $30 price tag. The demo version is available free of charge but only allows you to use certain terms such as "CONVENTIONAL" or "MOTOROLA" as the names of your systems. Luckily, my father in law didn't want a lot of fancy stuff or any trunked frequencies so I just named the system 'Conventional' and used only conventional frequencies.

Many other options of the scanner can be programmed by the computer software as well which is a nice feature.

The actual data transfer from the computer to the 246 was fast... less than 3 minutes to transfer data for about 180 channels. (This is about 6% of the memory available so there was certainly room left for additional channels if desired).

The Scanner Itself
As a physical unit, the scanner is the perfect shape and size. It fit comfortably in the palm of one hand and is relatively discrete. A nice change compared to the older models that are almost a foot tall.

Using the Scanner
After transferring the information to the scanner itself and after using the scanner for a few hours I noticed a few design flaws that took away from the scanner.

The speaker seemed small for a handheld scanner and it was often difficult to hear transmissions. Even with the volume turned all the way up I had to leave the unit close to my ear to clearly hear what was going on.

The backlight key is in a poor location... right below the lockout key. When using the scanner at night I would try to hit the backlight key to see what channel I was on and end up locking out the channel I was trying to listen to.

My Conclusion
Clearly Uniden advertises this as a top of the line scanner and it certainly does have all the bells and whistles that one would want with a scanner. You'll most likely never run out of channel space... alphanumeric display... compact unit... you can read the specs on the Uniden website. But truthfully I expected more from Uniden. For almost $300 (scanner and software) I don't want to compromise on quality or ease of use.

For the novice scanner I definitely would NOT recommend this scanner. Pick yourself up a scanner that is easier to program.

For the more experienced listener, this scanner will not dissapoint you with options and features, but you be dissapointed overall.