Saturday, July 14, 2012

One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

I lucked out and have found a few scanners being sold as junk by different individuals in the community.  They were old, and needed some cleaning and sprucing up, but to me I was thrilled to get them for a good price.  Even though they don't have all the bells and whistles of a brand new modern scanner, there still is tons of interesting things to be heard on them - trains, planes, ham radio, discriminator audio to name just a few.



The first acquisition was a Regency Digital Flight Scan receiver.  It has a wooden case and is a bit large. I got it home and, after a bit of work to find a motorola to bnc adapter, found that it receives ATC transmissions great.  I have found that modern broadband scanners have a hard time hearing ATC even though they are supposed to be such great receivers.  Filtering the FM broadcast band helps, but they are poor performers. It's nice to be able to have a dedicated ATC receiver.



The next find was a Uniden BC200XLT scanner.  The original owner had no use for it since it didn't do trunking.  I was excited to buy it. After adding a discriminator tap and mounting a jack in the housing (an advantage of having older larger scanners - there's more room to mount an audio jack), it's up and running as an additional analog scanner and discriminator source.


No comments:

Post a Comment