Pro-96
From The RadioReference Wiki
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.
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...
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.
PRO-96 User Reviews
Added: September 10th 2003
Reviewer: Everette Carman
Score: 5 stars
Hits: 7148
I bought a pro-96 on Monday 9/8/03 and received it on 9/9/03 i have been able to listen to apco-25 police frequencys in the chicagoland area and it is great listening to all the county trunked police frequencys of both Lake and Cook countys .It works great out of the box as long as you load the frequncys correctly.to those hesitant of putting out the money it is worth it also being able to decode the cttcs tones.I like having a combination of both the pro-92 and pro-93 in one radio.Everette Carman Waukegan,ill Taxicab driver
Posted by techs on 2004-03-06 06:26:57
My Score: 5 stars
I've had my PRO-96 for about a week now, and so far, it's proving to be well worth the money.
For the most part, RadioShack and GRE got it right with this scanner, compared with the others that I use. Particularly:
- It runs on actual AA batteries. When your rechargables die out at an inopprotune time, you can replace them quickly. Alkaline batteries also don't have a current leak problem that normally results in a dead battery in a dormant scanner.
- 5500 Channels?! My God, Man! I actually think that's too many, since I have other scanners available for other purposes. The V-Scanner trick that gives us 11 500-channel scanners approximately 30 seconds away from each other is a nice feature, though. It's certainly enough to set up the basic sets of frequencies that you listen to in a particular area or task.
- It mixes analog, trunked, and digital trunked systems all at the same time; no more fumbling in and out of trunked mode like some other scanners I own!
- The open bank vs. closed bank thing is handy.
- The priority weather scanning is a very nice feature.
However.... There are some things that arn't very nice about this radio. For starters, there's the typical RS ergonomics: The text input mode was designed by an absolute sadist, the volume knob goes from Extremely Loud to Very Loud to Loud to Mute with little control over Moderate and Soft, the cheap plastic belt clip scares me, the shiny plastic window over the display is perfectly designed to reflect all available ambient light directly into your eyes so you can't read the screen, and the typical chinzty case feel does not inspire the operator at all (especially when contrasted with radios with good ergonomics like the Alinco DJ-X2000).
Additionally, the V-Scanner bank layout isn't sufficient for a mostly-digital scanner.
With 500 channels available, it really needs to have 20 banks of 25 channels
instead of 10 banks of 50 channels. Controlling which systems we're listening to with
bank-toggling is actually what we want!
Futhermore, the talkgroup ID lists are totally inadequate for a major metropolitan area
APCO P-25 system. Having only five lists of 30 ID's each is entirely not enough,
especially if you wish to toggle lists on and off like frequency banks to select which
services you're listening to. With just one more keypress, we could have lists 00
through 99, with 10-20 ID's per list; resulting in absolute control over which portions of
the system you're interested in at any particular moment. (For example, changing
systems while travelling across town, or following a tactical event as different branches
of service respond.)
And while we're on the subject; why can't I define a particular talkgroup ID (or list of
ID's) as a priority scan? Yes, I want to scan the fire and police units that operate
near my home far more often than the rest of the ID's. Honest!
It's a good scanner, though... Here's hoping they make a better one.
Added: October 10th 2003
Reviewer: 2Robert4
Score: 3.5 stars
Hits: 4446
PRO-96 Update Colorado Springs, CO.( 9600 baud Project-25 systems). First impression it meets expectations Still looks like a toy and the sound is poor. After being in the dark for all most two years I was ready to try anything under $500. Lots of bells and whistles and it will take time to try them all out. But was scanning 15 Min after I got it home. If your area is not in the preload your in for some pain. Ordered the PRO-96 from RadioShack Monday (Store on E. Fillmore, the other stores didn’t have a clue!!). It arrived Thursday. The radio is not in the stores like the RadioShack WEB site said. CO-Colorado Springs/El Paso County (9600 baud Project-25 systems) is one of the preloaded data (V-Scanner #3, Bank 4). A list of preloads is in an Addendum that comes with the scanner. Instructions are in the Addendum on how to load the V-Scanner folder you need. After I read the instruction I still had problems loading the folder (user error). But after I figured it out and turned off the unwanted Banks it worked!! PROS and CONS (CON) The radio still has poor sound (speaker in the radio) like all of the other RadioShack scanners, WILL THEY EVER LEARN HOW TO DO IT LIKE UNIDEN!! The only other issue I have is with the volume, its almost OFF or MAX?? (PRO) The V-Scanner preload. If your area is loaded!! The bells and whistles Bottom Line, I think most everyone will be happy with the radio. There are always things you like or dislike and this will never change. I’m happy with the radio and will just plug in a headset and bypass the built in speaker.
Posted by Anonymous on 2004-12-31 14:48:28
My Score: 4.5 stars
I was really relunctant to shell out 500 dollars for a radio that had the Radio Shack name on it. I have been very content with only Uniden products up to this point. But with the many praises that i had read on the performance of this unit, i went ahead and purchased one of the Pro-96s. I have nothing but to say i am was and still impressed and overjoyed by the performance of this radio. This radio has been very good at tracking the conversation of my local emergency agencies with no problem. The unit to me was very user friendly. I was also very pleased to see that continous improvements can be made indefitely to the its DSP filmware by an internet download. This can only mean better listening opprotunities in the future and one does not have to pay a cent more. As for the speaker, what can one expect from a mobile unit. Yeah the sound of the speaker sounds cheap, but how can one get a good sound out of a little speaker. Bearcat scanners have the same problem in my view. With the digital technology the cheap sound becomes less annoying. One also has the option of ASG on/off that can help with the background noise that is generated out of the user's radios of the system being monitored, If one cannot tell, i am berry happy with this radio and recommend it to all ... Have a pleasant day or night and sunrises.
Posted by AEMTKieran on 2004-12-21 09:49:13
My Score: 5 stars
I have to disagree as far as the sound is concerned. I used the Pro 96 when I went to Colorado Springs last September, and it decoded the CSP quite nicely. Maybe you got a bad radio, I don't know, but it sounded great out in Colorado Springs!
Posted by ben on 2006-12-12
Okay, based on the dates, I'm adding my two cents well after everyone has packed up and gone home. But, I'll do it anyway since someone could still stumble upon this page.
I have occasionally seen folks mention that they do not like the audio coming out of the PRO-96's speaker. I have my PRO-96 sitting next to a Motorola XTS-5000 and the audio on both digital and analog talkgroups is nearly identical. The analog talkgroups are sometimes scratchier on the scanner than the radio, but the digital talkgroups are identical. I would imagine that these rare instances of poor audio can be chalked up to periodic poor production of the scanner. You can expect these performance outliers in just about any electronics.