BC250D

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PRO96 Vs. BC250D

Added: June 22nd 2004
Reviewer: Kieran O'Hagan
Score: 5 stars
Hits: 1912

OK, I just purchased the Radio Shack Pro 96. I have owned a BC250D for a little more than a year. There have been many questions about which radio to buy, and being single (heh heh), I decided to get both of them. Both radios are excellent, and each one has something over the other. The BC250 has plenty of room for alpha tagging; it will display both the bank tag and channel tag. During trunking, it will display ID list plus Talkgroup Tag. The Pro 96 will not show you the bank tag if you are running CTCSS or DCS; instead of the bank tag, it displays the tone information. The Pro 96 does not have ID list tags. The Pro 96 DOES have auto gain for the digital transmissions, and I swear the digital is much clearer on the Pro than on the Uniden. In fact, in my opinion, the Pro 96 digital transmissions almost sound like analog; they are clear, with little digitizing. The Uniden does LTR, EDACS SCAT, and EDACS Narrow. I do have an LTR System nearby, so the Uniden comes in handy for that. I commute between two metro areas, Poughkeepsie and White Plains; I visit my family in Pennsylvania, and a friend in Albany. With the Uniden, I have to reprogram it for different trips (no biggie, since I have ARC 250). With the Pro 96, I just call up a new V Scanner folder, and I'm ready to go. Uniden battery life...the pits. Pro 96? Throw in 4 AA batteries and I'm good to go, plus keep either NiMH or regular batteries in the spare holder. Uniden...military UHF aero. Pro 96, you have to get Win96. Here's the bottom line...both radios are good at what they were built for. If you need to listen to UHF aero, have an LTR trunking system or EDACS SCAT, then get the Uniden. If you just like listening to plain ole shoot em up or burn em down Motorola and EDACS public safety, get the Pro 96. Or, if you can, get them both. Above all...have fun! That's what the hobby is all about.

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Posted by Anonymous on 2005-06-05 23:56:29
My Score: 5 Stars

One other big benefit to the PRO-96...

Its ready for the 800Mhz Rebanding. The Win96 program is not needed to program the User-Table to whatever might be used locally. The Win96 program will be required to program the user Multi-Table, though.

To-date, the PRO-96 is the only scanner on the whole market that allows manually configuring 800Mhz Channel-Number tables. With, or without the Win96 program.

Soon alot of Trunk Scanners are going to loose their ability to track correctly Motorola Trunk Systems in the 800Mhz band. EDACS & LTR scanning will not be affected.

PRO-96 owners, rejoice...

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Posted by jimlawrence on 2004-06-27 12:04:03
My Score: 5 stars

Kieran makes some excellent points and he has written an excellent review comparing the two. Let me add just a few additional thoughts based on my experience using both radios. If your goal is to monitor UHF milair (225-400 MHz), I think the Uniden radio is the one for you. While it is true that using Don Starr's excellent Win96 program will open the UHF milair band on the Pro-96, the performance over some of this spectrum has been highly disappointing to me. For instance, I prefer monitoring Boston center on 282.2. My Pro-96 is deaf totally on that freq regardless of which antenna I use on the radio. However, I have discovered that the Pro-96 does a pretty good job on the milair band between 137-144 MHz. So if your listening targets are in that range, you'll be happy with either unit. All my local fighter squadrons make use of this range as do some of the tankers. As mentioned before, if your target is an LTR system, Uniden is your choice. I've been using my 250D to monitor LTR and once you get the channels figured out (no easy task!), the 250D does a fine job on them. If your target is a P-25 digital voice system, I think the Pro-96 is the way to go. Its digital decoding feature is far superior to the 250D's. No fidding with voice quality. When I want to listen to New Hampshire law enforcement (largely conventional) or federal land mobile, my Pro-96 is my choice everytime. And it did a great job for me on the Ohio MARCS, Indiana SAFE-T and other digital trunked systems. I'm still working on getting my Pro-96 to track the OPP system (VHF trunked) but this is a liveware problem and not a problem with the unit itself. For the record, I've had problems tracking this system with my 250D too but it's entirely me and not the hardware. One thing I find totally funky about the Pro-96 is its default and unchangable step size between frequencies. It's totally weird to me to see 165.6900 rather than 165.6875 for instance. GRE, get hip on this one, please. Yeah yeah...picky picky, I know. It almost makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong?????? Both radios offer control channel only Motorola system monitoring. I like that a lot. It's a breeze to use when traveling in states like Ohio, Indiana and Massachusetts. I find the Pro-96 is a little easier to set up for this feature. My thanks to my buddy Ken Windyka for turning me on to that feature. I find my 250D offers superior harmonic and image rejection compared to the Pro-96. This may be a factor if you live in a hot RF environment. Don't get me wrong, the Pro-96 isn't bad but the 250D hardly suffers from this at all. I think the 250D is a vastly superior search tool to the Pro-96. I love the ability to chain together up to 10 search ranges and hunt. The Pro-96 offers just one range at time as far as I can tell. I'm one of those who's always relentlessly searching for new active freqs and I think the 250D is much better at that. I've found the Pro-96's users manual to be a little more coherent than the 250D's. Not that many of us actually read the things...isn't that what the internet is for? Hope that helps. Corrections and advice always appreciated.

ARC250 comments

User: ckoetke Rating: 10 November 22, 2004
User's Average Rating: 10.0 # of Ratings: 1
better than scanstar software. the best interface and very easy to use. i highly recommend this for organizing your trunk banks on the 785D or 250D. has great sorting and cut/paste/move delete capabilities.

User: webbtown18 Rating: 10 July 26, 2003
User's Average Rating: 10.0 # of Ratings: 1
Very good program. Easy to use!!!!

User: iowaboy46 Rating: 9 March 21, 2003
User's Average Rating: 9.5 # of Ratings: 2
Very low learning curve. virtual control is wonderful but needs some work. otherwise I would rate 10.

IDTracker comments

User: Vibroplex Rating: 9 January 5, 2006
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 1
This programs in my humble opinion deserves a 10 - but having never had any program of a ten as a base point it get's a nine. A great program, ease of use and functional.

User: wbigcount Rating: 8 November 28, 2005
User's Average Rating: 8.0 # of Ratings: 1
Sometimes when u try to id a talk group and the press ok it goes back to no id on the talk group.

User: Hir8ed_2 Rating: 9 November 8, 2005
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 2
I believe this software would work with any Trunking radio, as long as you have VB 6.0 or higher installed in Windows.

User: monitoringpost Rating: 9 April 15, 2004
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 1
An excellent utility leaving only the imagination of the user on how one can exploit its many uses. Rated a nine as v2.9.0 is supposedly the last version to support the BC245xlt - hopefully support will be restored and it'll get 10 stars.

User: pro92b Rating: 10 April 2, 2004
User's Average Rating: 10.0 # of Ratings: 1
Excellent for identifying unknown talkgroups

User: mdc76082 Rating: 9 December 21, 2003
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 1
You all did a good job. Alot of these guys & gals expect too much when it comes to software and instructions. If I can muddle around with it and get the hang of it then any of these prissy prisses should be able to also. And I am by far the smartest guy on the planet. Thanks for the use of the software. - Mike (Springtown TX)

User: bear105 Rating: 8 September 18, 2003
User's Average Rating: 7.0 # of Ratings: 5
Clean and simple makes it very effective. I would give it a 10, if it would update the ID ALPHA tags on the scanner itself.

User: b7spectra Rating: 9 May 21, 2003
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 1
Excellent for capturing audio for those unknown channels/talk groups. Documentation could be better.

User: N4RVR Rating: 9 February 16, 2003
User's Average Rating: 9.0 # of Ratings: 1
Wish it had help built-in, but for the price, who's complaining? Excellent program that does what it's supposed to with no muss, no fuss. Packs a lot of features and works well with Windows XP. Great resource for those of us who own TrunkTrackers.

User: jsmcnicol Rating: 1 July 8, 2002
User's Average Rating: 1.0 # of Ratings: 1
I could never get this working even though all of my other trunking programs worked. Dose NOT work for Pro-1053. Download did not say you had to have the certen scanners listed in the notes.

User: blantonl Rating: 10 July 6, 2002
User's Average Rating: 9.5 # of Ratings: 2
Outstanding Application!

Radio Manager 2004 comments

User: mandlair Rating: 10 November 29, 2003
User's Average Rating: 10.0 # of Ratings: 1
EXCELLENT ID TRACKER,VIRTUAL CONTROL, AND SCANNER PROGRAMER,ALL IN ONE WORKS VERY WELL WITH BC250D