Uniden BCD536HP HomePatrol Series Digital Phase 2 Base/Mobile Scanner with HPDB and Wi-Fi. Simple Programming, TrunkTracker V, S.A.M.E. Emergency/Weather Alert. Covers USA and Canada.

One of the best dugital scanners on the market.

I have listing to a police scanner for many of years and when my county went digital then i went a bought a bran new radio shack digital police scanner gave close to 500 hundred dollars for it but unfortunately Once again my county made some more changes where they went to the Tenn Advance system and you had to have a phase one and phase two scanner to be able to pick up my frequencys so once again i had to pay big bucks for another police scanner and i bought the BCD536HP off Amazon i have got to say with out a doubt this is a very nice and up to date police scanner very easy to learn that the radio shack pro 197 I had .but the down side of it all is i have put in to close to 1000 dollars in two scanners in the last 4 years so hopefully that my county want change anything else around because what they did the last time costed them over 20 million dollars what i herd and also herd that before it is all over and done with everybody will eventually have to have a phase 1 and phase 2 scanner because they are suppose to upgrade all counties to that in the near future but like i said this is a very nice scanner i love it have not learned ever thing on it yet but i am getting there Good Luck Scanner World

Easy to set up

The scanner is amazing! I will say you need to be a bit tech savvy because the manual has a lot to be desired, but with Google and YouTube, programming for the home was an absolute breeze. Once you connect it to your home WiFi you can use the Siren app to listen to it anywhere in your home on you phone or tablet. Worth the money and the time to set it up.

Ive bought just about every new scanner thats been available over the last few years and this is a go-to unit. If you know your way around the software/programming and new digital technology these days youll probably love this thing. It can also be fairly easy to use as a beginner or someone who doesnt care to get too involved. Lots of options available to upgrade the firmware as well. It has good audio and decode quality and receives very well. Many useful features and ways to custom program.

Typing in your zip code to start scanning is very easy, but this scanner picks up so many transmissions from so far away that it is overwhelming. There is no easy way to bypass the transmissions you dont want or select only the transmissions you do want. The scanner itself is very good, with clear sound and long range using just the included antenna. If you are willing to pay extra the company offers to sell you a new sd card with your choice of county options, but after paying so much for the scanner in the first place it shouldnt cost extra to be able to program the scanner correctly. If you want an easy to program scanner to listen to only the agencies you want to hear, this is NOT it.

I love how easy it is to program this scanner by simply entering your zip code, but that may also overwhelm you with channels you dont care that much about which causes it to take much longer to scan through all the channels and you can easily miss parts of a conversation or updates about an event. So, youll still have to learn how to go through your channel list and block out the ones you dont want so you dont miss the important things you do want to hear (such as police band or fire and rescue traffic only). Otherwise you may hear the dispatch say something, then it takes so long to get back around to that channel again and you missed the response. My other major dislike about this scanner is it has no auto volume control feature. You set the volume to a normal level and then you have these very loud female dispatchers come on and blow you out of the room. You turn it down so it doesnt disturb everyone in the house and you cant hear anyone else. The extreme difference in volume levels during the same conversations on the same channels is more than annoying and a very good reason not to buy this scanner, it gets old very fast, especially at night when other people in your house may be trying to sleep. Almost everything out there in the market these days, tvs, stereos, etc has a very simple feature known as auto volume control or auto leveling for the audio output stage so your volume level will stay fairly consistent as you switch channels or input sources, and its usually enabled by default. I thought maybe I turned it off accidently somehow but after looking through a lot of the forums this seems to be a very common complaint with most of these scanners, the feature simply isnt there, and the company doesnt seem to care much about fixing the problem. Its hard for me to believe a scanner so technically advanced would not have this very basic and much needed feature, but do consider this before making a purchase. The only fix Ive found so far is to route the output audio of this scanner thru another (extra cost over the $500 you are spending) device that does control the audio output level and make it consistent. Overall, if you can live with the extreme volume level differences, then this isnt a bad scanner, but there are other brands out there that work just as well and dont have that type of ongoing unresolved issue. One last thing Ill say... youll be paying a whole lot for this scanner versus the price of an analog scanner or even digital scanners from some other companies. Its nice that they have released a product that is usable now, and has a builtin feature to upgrade the firmware as they continue to work on it, but in reality the software is an unfinished product and youll have to pay dearly to get the other features added to your scanner as they complete them. I thought I was paying a lot for a well supported product but right after I spent my money on this I learned there are a few updates available for it but Ill have to pay even more to get those. Thought I did all my research on scanners before making this purchase, but knowing what I do now, I think the choice would have been the other one I was looking at instead. For reference previous scanners owned were a Radio Shack Pro Base Station (still have), 2 Bearcat Mobile (still have 1), 3 Bearcat Handhelds (still have 1).

If youre familiar with the menu system on Uniden/Bearcat scanners over the past 10 years, you will not have to relearn everything from scratch with this unit. I love the extra long lines of text that can be used for naming Systems, Sites, Departments, and individual channels/talkgroups. There is an extra layer of complexity introduced with the Favorites feature which can make enabling/disabling groups of channels with just the numpad+.+E keys a tricky mess, but the Favorites feature itself is cool. A Favorite is like an entire set of systems/groups/channels in a scanner grouped into a bucket, where you can now have multiple of those named buckets to enable/disable at will, like Local Only, Vacation Spot, Imported from RadioRef, I Love Railroads!, etc. Having those Favorites saved to the included SD card is cool, as well as the HomePatrol feature of preloaded sets of systems across the entire US and Canada, scannable and selectable by Lat/Long. The USB dongle is included, and the Uniden Sentinel software is free for updating the firmware and the SD Cards national database. I have been using BuTels ARC software with prior Uniden scanners, and there is a version for this scanner too. There is a useful multi-color ring LED that can be lit for specific types of services or individual channels; note that youll never see it light up if you only ever scan with the built-in national database. When I programmed channels I set it to light up blue for Police, red for Fire/EMS, green for Public Works, and more for other services. I set it to flash for my hometowns channels, which is easily visible from across a room. I also tried out Unidens Siren app on Android to listen to the scanner remotely within my house through WiFi, which is a cool concept but a bit buggy right now; occasionally the app gets stuck or stops streaming audio even though the system/site/channel continues to follow along in realtime. The app cannot handle higher-latency network connections, so if you connect to your scanner from outside your home through a VPN, the app will show system/site/channel but will not stream any audio. There is a purchasable, third-party Windows desktop app that can do this called ProScan; there may be others. For a relatively small receiver this thing is heavy! I like that it has a 13.8VDC input for the AC Adapter, and a 3-pin 13.8VDC jack commonly used for mobile receivers.

Nice unit very hard to program. Unless your computer savvy. Returned and got sds200 programmed 3 counties but very nice unit would buy again

I purchased two of these units that were shipped via Amazon Prime (VERY FAST). They replaced two older scanners that would not receive P25 Phase II Trunked Radio Systems as our local law enforcement is all changing to a new system. I had previously purchased a BCD436HP so had already developed a basic load that would work in these radios. The reality is that these are much better than the portable - they do not seem to suffer from the VHF/UHF oscillator induced de-sense that plagues the handheld version. Their sensitivity at VHF and UHF is comparable to the GRE units that they replaced. I use one of these in my base station and one in my mobile. So far they are working GREAT!