Uniden BCD996P2 Digital Mobile TrunkTracker V Scanner, 25,000 Dynamically Allocated Channels, Close Call RF Capture Technology, 4-Line Alpha display, Base/Mobile Design, Phase 2

This scanner is capable of receiving the majority of everything (not encrypted) in the Police/Fire/Public Service/Military Air/Gov/Misc bands in either analog or digital modes. It receives APCO P-25 digital (both Phase I & II) signals great for me with a stock antenna but I am in a good location to receive two actual P-25 trunk radio “system site” towers with good signal levels. With digital 800 Mhz signals though, you may need less antenna. About 6.5 inches in length is a good 800 Mhz antenna. With an attic mount ST-2 antenna on a tv antenna booster, I can receive analog signals 60 plus miles away cleanly but that’s flat terrain to the top of the Willis Tower.If you have marginal (P-25) 800 Mhz signal levels you won’t get many signal bars lit up, it won’t trunk track right and you may see talkgroups show up on the display but no audio is heard/garbled/breaks up because it can’t decode the digital modulation, or it just might be encrypted. When you get trunking lock on a control channel in APCO P-25 mode, the actual frequency will show up (small) on the display, otherwise you just get “NFM” on the display which means you’re not tracking the system and it will not work. But once you get lock on a control channel, if it all works correctly, it grabs talkgroups at will and you will have to label them or sort out what you wish to really listen to as there will be plenty of (channels=talkgroups) at busy times.With digital trunking systems, it depends on the tower near you having the talkgroup channels you want to hear available on that tower. As far as digital trunking signals go with any digital scanner, all bets are off. The signals fade out at times, some of these RF tower signals get more/less power alloted to them on each tower. In order to fully monitor one P-25 system, the scanner may have to “listen to” 6 or more towers (in one system) that are all directions from you with varying RF power levels on each frequency, in order to properly receive ALL of your chosen channel (talkgroups) in that Police system you want to hear. If this seems too complicated, well it is. There is a Computer Control channel on P25 digital trunking systems that tells the police system computer what frequency to use or “hop to” (each split second) and you may get that individual frequency’s (talkgroup) good/bad/gone off various towers (and all at nearly the same time yet!) This is called simulcasting distortion and makes listening to any APCO P-25 digital Police trunking radio system extremely hard for any new digital scanner. And the nasty winds, rain, leaf foliage too all mess havoc with these signals. No getting around this. You may be in a good/bad location, it all depends. You may have missed details in your programming, yes I did too many times. Could be your location, your antenna, your programming, proximity to too many other “site” towers, winds, (high winds or hot/humid air seem nasty on narrow P-25 signals), or the big TV/Radio/Cell Towers nearby with mega kw watts etc. It is a huge complicated mess even for an expert radio engineer to deal with. A lot of it is…trial and error with P-25 digital. Does it track control signal? No. Move antenna/radio a few inches, try again. But the BCD996P2 (once setup right) excels at receiving everything great!This scanner works Great for me in my location even on the factory antenna. And the bandscope mode is fabulous too. I love it. It is up to you to sort out the critical-channel-programming first before you use it. Study the Radio Reference website, it might take time. I would advise to use a computer to program this scanner, otherwise you’ll just pull your hair out. You can’t program this scanner by using zip codes like some others. Freescan (sixspotsoftware) is a great Free program to use, I use it, others exist too. You can plug the scanner into your PC via the included USB cable. My Win 7 PCs found it right away (You setup Control Scanner, Set com port to auto find in Freescan and it should find your scanner on a com port. Then you upload your channels/lineups to the scanner) But first you need to find the frequencies in the Radio Reference website. Freescan also has a Cut ‘N’ Paste frequency import method which works fine as you select from database info.An outside scanner antenna used with at least an RG-6 cable is optimal for the best reception with this extended coverage scanner to hear everything. I also use a cheap (75 ohm) TV antenna signal booster with 18 db gain, on 50ft RG-6 and a 4 port ant splitter. I have a lot of RF signal levels (using bandscope mode) but no overload that I can see or hear. But for local signals (20 miles or less) you probably will do just as well with the back of set stock antenna, for both analog channels and digital systems. For 800 Mhz specific signals, use a 800 Mhz antenna like a Remtronix.The scanner can be used in the car, it comes with 2 DC power cords, one with a lighter plug, it has a nice bracket and includes the AC adapter. This unit is the base model of the portable BCD325P2 hand held scanner. They are the same to operate/use and program. This 996P2 model has a bottom fire speaker with a “deep bass audio sound” on digital systems and it sounds like a loudness circuit in a stereo, compared to my RS-652 desktop scanner which has a tinnier sound. You can choose one of 7 colors for the display and it has many signal adjustments for each channel/system, which is why you need patience. You can upgrade this scanner now to receive ProVoice, Mototrbo and DMR but Uniden charges an extra fee for each one. I do not have these upgrades and may not get.These new digital scanners are frustration devices to many people. For the expert, yes, this scanner is marvelous, you can “hear” everything except Encrypted signals. Be sure you have days/weeks of time and patience to spend with this thing first though. The learning curve is very steep. It is not plug it in, put in a few channels and listen like in the old days. Every channel has about a dozen parameters to setup first, a P-25 digital system may have 2 dozen parameters to setup first, then one dozen items per channel on top of this. This scanner does Not use an SD memory card to store channels/data to. These can be problematic and cause odd errors of all kinds. But the BCD996P2 scanner is a techs dream to use (once programmed properly) and a upgraded cousin to my all time favorite pal the Uniden BCD396XT portable scanner. But this scanner is still quite a challenge for anyone to setup/operate/use. Five stars because it is simply a phenomenal scanner (with exceptional abilities) targeted to mostly expert scanner junkies.

Excellent, solid construction, could be complicated if you are new to scanning. The newest update of the excellent bct15/996 lineup, uniden really has a good system there and being a Phase 2 digital this scanner be good for the foreseeable future.If you are new to scanning, this receiver might not be the best place to start, however if you locale uses digital trunked systems I would recommend jumping into this radio. If your local doesn’t use digital systems you might be better off getting a bct15x ([very similar to this radio minus digital], if locale has analog trunked systems) or a bc125at if there are not any trunked systems. You can check what your local services use in the radioreference.com frequency database.This scanner is capable of listening to police UHF VHF, fire UHF VHF, railroads, aviation 118-130 MHZ ish, GMRS/MURS/FRS(walkie talkies) 460 MHZ ish, Marine band, weather band(noaa) 160 ish mhz, HAM radio, state police/highway patrol operating in the 30-40 mhz range, cb radio. This scanner does not have ssb so its not a good solution to listen to longer wave ham or shortwave broadcasts.Like I said it can be complicated, however once you understand it, it becomes a very powerful tool. I had little trouble with it but I had previously used scanners so I wasn’t overloaded with the radio mumbo jumbo, all I needed to learn was how to operate the radio itself. A good place to learn the radio “mumbo jumbo” would be radioreference.com. Compared to the radioshack/whistler units may have 20 “scan lists” (newer models have more I believe). While they are not equivalent, in conventional systems with the uniden you have 10 group ‘quick keys’ per system and 100 systems with ‘quick keys’ all of which can be independently toggled. So in theory you can have 1000 “scanning bank toggles” just by using groups and system quick keys. Trunked systems are programmed slightly different but afford plenty of customization. And work around systems and groups. Also this radio has the ability to search for talkgroups within trunked systems.You can technically get more than 1000 groups/100 systems into this receiver using tags but the quick keys seem easiest and I would be shocked if you could use them all for you regular scanning (obviously if you wanted to program your whole state things would get pretty full, however you would be able to get a pretty large coverage. I have the entirety of California Highway Patrol programmed in mine(I use 1 system for each division), as well as 3 counties [Stanislaus, Merced, San Luis Obispo] (including most cities in them) (fire, pd, sheriff, ambulance services, HAM and aviation) and I’m only using 30 systems out of 100. And those are fairly spread out to allow minute adjustments in which departments/services I’m listening to, where as if you condensed them you could use far less than 30 systems.Receive is very good. I operate mostly conventional systems in the UHF (Police, Fire, Ham), VHF (Sheriff, fire, ham, aviation) area, but have a trunked motorola 800mhz which does very well, and also use it to scan for CHP mobile extenders (handheld radios) which operate as a conventional p25, it receives those no problem. For CHP I primarily use my other scanner a BCT15x because I have it attached to an antenna optimized for around 40 mhz however for my bcd966p2 I use a larsen triband 150/450/800 and it works great at pulling in vhf/uhf/and 800mhz it even pulls in chp in the 40mhz quite well for a small antenna.

Very nice digital police scanner at a great price. Easy to program using freescan and Radio reference.

I got my first scanner 3 months ago. It programmed itself with a zip code. I’m definitely a beginner.But with this scanner, it took me only a few minutes to figure out how to put in my city’s channels (I already knew the channels). I like this one so much, it even has loads more memory for saved channels.A negative is the speaker is on the bottom. You can flip the screen so the speaker is on top, but then all the buttons are upside down, so it’s not ideal, but it works.

If this is your first digital, pray for patience.I thought I was prepared. Had watched a lot of videos on programming but it still took a while.First just go ahead and pay the subscription for radio reference.Before you receive it, find free scan and the driver for the scanner.If after you install the driver the computer won’t recognize the the scanner. Turn the scanner off and back on. It’s funny how those few words took so long to to learn.The reason I gave it 5 stars for ease of use is because any frustration I was having was just because of inexperience. Now I love it. Now the filing system makes sense.When you first import from radio reference use your username and not your email.No when you import from the p25 system, to me it was messy. But it was working. So I took time and learned how to put together a more organized system.I like being able to record the feeds, and this past weekend while running the sound through the computer I was able to listen through Bluetooth.Hope this helps and hope y’all have a blessed day.