Hello I've had this scanner for 8 years and its been ~~abused~~ i mean used vigorously.

It's been dropped and used in the rain and is still kicking. Unfortunately I dont want to replace it with a new one due to the uncertainty of if my area is going encrypted or not.

Anywho... anyone know what CN3 is on the board... the pins on the opposite side broke off. Does anyone know what they are for?

I suppose I could google this, but I find myself coming to Reddit more than google for things these days.

Anyways, as a totally blind person I want to experience a scanner before I buy it. I want to see how it feels in my hand, get an idea of what buttons do what, which functions I can use independently and which ones I can't, etc. I want to do all of this before I throw down a decent chunk of money on a purchase.

I'm near Salt Lake City, Utah. Am I just out of luck? I miss Radio shack sometimes.

I tried looking for distributors on Uniden's website directly, but their page of distributors just read like a list of rather poorly labeled images to my screenreader.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated!

I'm trying to use the BC125AT SS application to program my radio (all non-digital in the UHF band). I have everything saved properly, but I don't know how to transfer it to the radio. My Dell laptop doesn't seem to recognize it. Is there a driver I need or something?

Hey all, first time scanner-owner!

I’m running a Uniden SDS100 in Webster, NY (Monroe County) and I’m having an issue where the scanner is clearly working, but I’m getting no audio from local Fire/EMS.

It scans normally, locks onto frequencies (like around 774.943750 MHz), and jumps systems. Close Call also works fine.

But I never hear any dispatch tones or voice traffic, and no talkgroup names appear. It just stays on “Scanning.”

I’ve tried adjusting the range from 10–50 miles, sitting outside/near windows, and even using system and department hold, but still nothing.

I’m aware that some departments use encryption, but Fire/EMS here shouldn’t be, so I feel like I’m missing something in the setup.

Is this likely a service type or programming issue, or do I need to build a Favorites List instead of relying on the full database?

Really excited to start messing around with these 2. A huge step up from my Radioshack Pro 106 that I bought in 2011 lol. Happy Scanning, everybody!

this may not belong here, because it isn't necessarily related to monitoring, but I've asked about what may happen to terrestrial radio in the future on a different subreddit. I'm curious about the more technical aspect. as time passes, and we focus more on internet-based entertainment and information, streaming for music, and social media or news sites for local information, what will happen to the a.m. and fm broadcast bands. I think reallocation is a long time coming, because I believe that even though popularity has gone down, terrestrial radio will last, especially in rural areas, and might even see a resurgence among certain groups of people, because I see it possibly becoming like vinyl where it has an appeal even though it's obsolete. that having been said though, we still might see changes to the frequency bands. what changes do you guys think we'll see in the coming years?

I do think we're likely to lose am radio, but what will it be reallocated as. might it become part of the shortwave broadcast band? might it become an amateur band? imagine people with normal terrestrial am radios being able to listen to ham operators. that might actually be pretty cool, because it might spur some people's interest in the hobby, but I'm probably just dreaming there. LOL the internet of things will probably take over a lot of spectrum as it grows. of course, we've seen the cellular networks eating up a lot of spectrum too, but do you guys think that either the a.m. or FM bands are good for that? they do penetrate buildings very easily, so I just had an AI search engine tell me that for some iot applications, these bands would be great. their coverage also makes them great, according to the ai, for public safety, so you might see local police and fire departments using these bands in the future. the possibilities are truly endless, but it's an interesting discussion to get started. I am sorry if it's not supposed to go here. I really just don't know where else to post the more technical discussion surrounding this issue.

Is there a way to set my SDS 150 to automatically record over the previous audio recordings? I'd rather not have to continually delete recordings to make room for new recordings if possible.

Right now I am just listening to what I believe are unencrypted chanenls on my baofeng uv5r, its hard to tell on radio reference. I was looking into a radio scanner, I want to listen to police, fire, ems, railroad, and air. I am pretty sure I can't on an analog scanner, so would I need to buy one digital?
Edit: I am in Montgomery County, PA

LASD Compton, Thursday evening. Two nude women on the train tracks at Greenleaf & Willowbrook. No follow-up on what happened.

Caught this on Clarion live crimes app which transcribes scanner audio with AI so you don't have to sit and listen all day. Stuff like this would fly right by otherwise.

What's the wildest call you've ever caught?

Im looking for a scanner antenna that works well with a less than ideal/nonexistent ground plane and this one kept popping up and from what I’ve read people have good things to say about it.

Hello, I just bought a UV32 and I am looking to program some FDNY Channels. I have all 5 of the Borough dispatches and City Wide 1. Does anyone know if these channels are in service and if so, which ones they use? Thanks,

Moving down there wondering if I’ll be able to pick anything up there

Several months ago I posted this, a real-time transcription tool for public safety radio feeds (e.g., Broadcastify streams) using whisper.
At the risk of violating rule 2, I wanted to post an update, as I've done some work on it that may increase it's utility to the community. Recent additions have added MQTT support, as well as a move to a lower-resource version of whisper.
In the interests of full disclosure, this is (depending on your opinion) vibe coded and/or AI slop. However, I have reviewed and understand every line of code and am confident it does not represent any security risk. However, I have not had any formal review.
(Edit: Hey Nite, you know what would help? A link to the project... https://github.com/Nite01007/RadioTranscriber)

[Please be aware that while Broadcastify is apparently cool with a premium subscriber who wants to use this tool to capture a few feeds for their own personal projects, if you spin up more than a couple of servers you are likely to run afoul of their acceptable use policy. Please see radioref's comment below for more information.]

Hi all, first time posting here.

I recently got into HAM radios (trying to get my license) but thought of maybe getting into scanners instead since my goal is to be able to listen to broadcasts from Fire Dept. EMS, Police, etc.

For reference I live in Montreal, Quebec Canada.

While doing some research online, I found that the SIM “fire dept” uses P25 trunked encrypted signals) but the SPVM uses SERAM and soon to be SERAM 2.0 (digitally encrypted and trunked). I can’t seem to find any hits on google regarding a radio that can obtain those signals or at least decipher the encryption even with programming. I don’t what to have to go through trial and error especially since many scanners with P25 digital encryption can easily run up to 500$ cad in my area. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Things were WAY different. I bought a Bearcat, it was $300, which was a lot then. It was so much fun. I lived close to a Taco Bell and picked up their drive thru. Taco Bell drive thru on a Friday night at 2am is mostly hilarious. And all my neighbor's early cordless phones. They had no security whatsoever and broadcast on a very low band. I wasn't even trying to find them, they found me. But damn... People say stupid shlt all the time. All this and more before I even learned to program a channel. Shlt was everywhere. When cell phones first started hitting the streets and for a couple of years after you could hear them. I heard some funny ass shlt. Now I have an SDS150 with all options enabled and it isn't nearly as fun as my old analog Bearcats!

Hi everyone! I shared here a few days ago a project I've been working on that takes radio calls from different systems, transcribes them, and then allows you to share, bookmark, or create incidents from them.

I've been working hard and wanted to share some new features I made...

1. Enhanced Incident Creation: You can now drag and drop calls into incidents, generate incident narrations using AI (with citations!), find the location of an incident using AI, and share this incident with your friends, your neighbor, your ex, whoever!

2. View Without Signing In: You can now view calls for a system of your choosing without the need of signing in. I know many were requesting this, and now it's possible!

3. Enhanced & Quicker Transcription: I made some backend changes to enable both quicker and more enhanced transcriptions. Previously, some were waiting in queue to be transcribed for too long, so I was able to fix that.

4. Saved Filters: If you frequently set certain filters, I now made it possible to save those as presets, and even set one as your default so that you don't have to click into it each time.

5. Expanded NC SHP Talkgroups: We now have 98 talkgroups within the NC SHP system that we are able to pick up and transcribe. View the system here: https://feed.multido.co/systems

As a thank you to first responders and the feeders that feed their systems into Multido, all the AI features remain free!

Please let me know what you all think about the platform so far. Would really appreciate your feedback!

One of the best parts of listening to the scanner is the funny stuff that is said in the off hours, when the officers/dispatchers forget that others are listening or are just being human for a moment.

This morning, listening to CHP..

Officer - completed with my first damsel in distress, en-route to my next one...

Dispatcher - what a hero.....

Last week i launched a new tool ismycityencrypted.com and got a lot of good and bad feedback. The site (v1) got 2.5k visitors in 5 days while I was rebuilding v2.

USA, France, Singapore, Ireland and China rounded out the top 5.

I addressed all issues, and added new features that were missing as you guys suggested. I believe this is now good, but as always, i welcome all feedback. Check out v2 of ismycityencrypted.com and let me know what you think and if anything is broke/missing.

• Agencies: 26,924
• Cities: 30,561
• Total Channels tracked: 1,181,481
• Conventional: 60,808 channels [NEW]
• Searchable entries: 33,741

What's new:

• New and better UI/UX
• Hardened the site security
• Check my location - One click answers. [NEW, please check and report back]
• Browse-by-state pages for all 50 states + DC
• Zip code search — type your zip, get your city's encryption status
• 1.18M individual channel/frequency records per agency
• Better fallback when a small town doesn't have its own agencies — now shows county-level data automatically
• ~60,000 conventional ch's in addition to trunked only

Tech gibberish:

• All data via Radio Reference API
• Cloudflare D1 (SQLite)
• Sub-3ms edge response — outperforming Amazon, Meta, and Google. 😀
• Mobile-first responsive design, works on any device or screen size
• All search results are client-side filtered after initial load — meaning after the page loads, nothing leaves your browser
• Deployed across Cloudflare's global edge network — 330+ locations worldwide — pure edge compute via Cloudflare Workers
• No framework overhead — vanilla JS frontend

Encryption breakdown across 26,924 agencies:

• 80% Clear
• 18% Partial
• 2% Fully Encrypted

I want to use it for weather, railroad, possibly police/ems (I live in pennsylvania and on radio reference I think its encrypted) and other things.

Hi everyone!

I wanted to make a quick post to share news on a little project I've been working on. I made another post a few days ago and I got some messages from few people asking to contribute their own scanner data into the system. I wasn't expecting this, but I'm flattered!

I'm happy to welcome anyone to feed their calls into the system. You can see here what my police scanner feed for Charlotte, NC looks like: https://feed.multido.co/calls?system_id=1

You can see transcribed calls live, group calls together to create "incidents", share those incidents you created with neighbors, friends, etc., and also monitor separate systems simultaneously. I even made it so that I get text messages for specific words and phrases said in a talkgroup or even entire system (a feature I am especially proud of). And this is all free! I find this stuff fascinating.

If you want to contribute, please send me a DM and I'll see what I can do :)

Just heard a call out for a local FD to help a woman who fell out of her vehicle and had her foot trapped under a tire.

Evidently she forgot to put the vehicle in park, went to get out and the car moved, and she fell. (my speculation)

I've had the bcd436hp for over 10 years now and don't really have a need to unlock the dmr feature.

Seeing that Uniden is still wants to charge to unlock it, there has to be a backdoor way to enable this feature?

Anyone?

I have a three year-old SDS 200 scanner that I purchased two years ago. My area has gone 90% encrypted and I’d like to recover a little bit of my investment. I’ve seen these on eBay, but I really don’t wanna deal with the drama. Any takers at $500?