Uniden BC355N 800 MHz 300-Channel Base/Mobile Scanner, Close Call RF Capture, Pre-programmed Search “Action” Bands to Hear Police, Ambulance, Fire, Amateur Radio, Public Utilities, Weather, and More, Black

It came on time it works I am still working on getting some of the channels I live down the road 1 to 2 minutes from my local frie department have not been able to pick them up but can pick up other fire department far away

Will not receive some am frequencies.

It works well. My only complaint is it came through the mail in it’s original packaging- just the scanner box with a shipping label popped on it. Not even an extra strip of tape to hold it closed for sure. We’re lucky it wasn’t damaged , anything missing from inside or totally stolen. We had a good laugh thinking, well it sure came fast because they just printed our address and put it straight on the box, no added hassle or time.

I program scanners all the time and I needed the manual for this one. It is not very easy to use and very tedious to program. I bought it to monitor 3 specific local analog frequencies and because of its small form factor. For my purposes, it’s adequate. However, even for beginners, spend a few extra few dollars as there are much more capable, and less frustrating, entry-level scanners available from Uniden.

This scanner after some time of playing around with became pretty easy to navigate. I knew from the start that it was analog but I didnt go digital because of the price difference. I thought that I would at least be able to pick up some local stations, but nothing. I live a good 45 minutes from NYC and I was picking up Brooklyn but nothing local. I will have to wait and get a digital scanner and see how it goes. I ended up returning the unit. I have to say though if you think your area is still running analog this scanner would be fine.

I bought this for my local fire department and ems communications to listen to in my vehicle and when I get home. The sound quality is amazing and it is really easy to set up with the right support from YouTube videos!

This is a hard review to write. I purchased this because as a CERT responder I wanted to know what was going on the Police, Fire, and Emergency channels. But so far the only channel I have received anything on is the Weather channel. I live near a large city in Southern Utah so it isnt like I am somewhere out in the boonies. Maybe the police, fire, and emergency people use a different range of frequencies than this radio is tuned for. I cant complain about the radio, but I am disappointed that I cant get the broadcasts I was hoping for.

This does not have the 700 mhz frequency and the reception is crappy. You get what you pay for.

Do a search online for what frequencies your town uses for fire and police. radio reference dot com is the one I used. Go down the list and find your town, to the right of your town , in the mode section if it says P25= this scanner will NOT work. means its Digital/private. This is a analog machine. If however it says FM under mode area for your town, you WILL get that station just fine, meaning its analog. You can buy scanners that pick up the P25 digital mode but they are alot more money. Hope this helps new customers in deciding as my town has the police in p25 mode and i cannot listen with this machine, but the fire is in fm so i can listen. ..........im still learning, but as for trying to GET TO A SPECIFIC STATION=... hit the band button and toggle it to the basic area you want say 100 to 200 , now hit scan, soon as your near the number you looking for hit the HOLD BUTTON, and use the up or down arrows to get to it. thats all, when someone talks on that , it will come on automatically. ........ as for saving a favorite to your bank... same deal as above, go to Bank, select the area you want example 100-200, search, soon as near number hit HOLD, use up down to get to number you want...Now hit the PROG button, then hit the PRIVATE BUTTON..there you can put it in the bank you want(it blinks to select a bank think you ca nstore 100 on here or something) now Hit PROGRAM again , and it saves it ..so next time you can just hit private and your saved banks of liked frequencies are over there, .. mine just wont work right with my saved ones but im not sure if it will listen to all my saved ones when one is activated or what yet as still learning this machine(grumbles lol) also that cc weird thing on bottom left I read will go to any live talk or something, non stop?, in reviews above, but i havent tried it out yet. Well thats all for now, if I figure anything more , ill update this post if need.

I live in an area that still uses analog communications for emergency services, so I was looking for a simple scanner that I could program with a few banks. This scanner seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunately, it wasnt until I started to program it that I realized its massive flaw. I honestly dont understand how the designers of this scanners firmware could be so completely incompetent in their design. The police/fire/emergency banks along with air and marine are completely unusable if you are near any amount of traffic at all. The scanner is reported as 3 x 100 bank programmable, where 1 bank is Private 1 is Police/Fire/Emrg and 1 is air/marine. The issue is, the only way to scan programable banks for police/fire/emrg or air/marine is to enable the associated built in channels with those banks. There are almost 4000 channels that get scanned if you turn those on. Your programmable banks get scanned *after* those channels and at 100cps, thats a 20 second round trip. Whats even worse than that, is the scanner only has the ability to lock out 100 of those 4000 channels, so if you are near a city of any size it will hang constantly on digital signals that you cant disable. So what does this mean? Well you cant use a lot of the scanner and setup becomes very tedious. Police and air banks add almost 2000 channels each to your scan. This is slow and with only 100 lockouts you will never be able to filter out the noise in a busy area. If you enable fire/emrg (without police) you add about 300 channels and marine (without air) only adds about 90 and these will allow you to enable the other two private banks. I recommend enabling these and locking out everything local in the pre programmed banks and then adding the channels you want scanned into private, fire, and marine. This gives you control to enable/disable banks with 300 channels total and you should only have about 350 preprogrammed channels to contend with ( hopefully your 100 lockout limit will make these listenable in your area) WX and CB bands are fixed, so you get what you expect there. I dont recommend this scanner at all and I really cant believe it was built this way. A simple setting to turn off pre-programmed banks would make things so much easier.