Rant - Scanners are not getting too complex

I was reading an article online the other day, which was talking about how scanners have gotten very complex and how people are buying a SDS100 type scanner and then returning it as it is too hard for them to use, this has got me thinking a bit about how the scanning hobby has been changing and what the future holds.

Personally I think we have two different issues here, the radios and radios systems we want to listen to have gotten more complex and the second is that people are getting lazy and expecting things to just work.

The first issue is beyond our control; over the years radio systems (especially for the 000 services) have gotten more and more complex.

From the early days of simplex communications where you knew the ambulances were on 76.1MHz to repeaters and trunking like we have with the TASGRN and now APCO25 digital which is being used more and more across Australia and the world. This is not something that Uniden and other companies can do anything about as all they are doing is producing scanners that will fill a market need which is to listen to what radios systems are being used at the moment, if APCO25 and trunking were not in wide spread use, do you think companies would be spending money designing and making a scanner to listen to them.

The second issue which I get quite annoyed with is that I feel some people are so used to computers doing wonderful things and equipment in general just working, they don’t want to put the time or effort in to learning about how these new scanners works and programming them up.

I can remember when I purchased my first UBC245XLT to listen to the TASGRN (before I knew anybody else who was in to scanning) it took me weeks to get it to work as it was all trial and error to get the settings right but once I did I got a feeling of achievement that I would never have got if somebody had of just done it for me. You can’t buy a top of the range digital trunking scanner and expect it to be as easy to program as the 10 channel one you had 25 years ago was.

The other day I got an email from somebody who had just purchased a UBCD436PT and was having some issues getting to work. In the end they ONLY wanted to listen to the police and when I told them they could not where they lived, they took it back for a refund.

My advice to people wanting to buy a scanner is this:
1) Research what you want to listen to and the sort of equipment that you can buy.
2) Ask people who are close to you what they use and if possible try and have a play with some of there gear to see what you think of it.
3) When you do buy a scanner don’t expect it to just work out of the box, you need to put time and effort in to setting it up to suit what you want to listen to.

Do you agree / disagree, have comments? Send me a message using the contact form or add a comment to this post.