I have always been a PRO-43 fan but when LAPD went digital I gave up
scanning. A friend who is commercial radio repair guy and general
Motorola freak always carries a Motorola ASTRO Saber to listen to LAPD
and other specific high dollar handhelds for each service he listens
to. Nothing like having the same radio as your local PD for a scanner.
When the PRO-96 came out our sick puppy bought one and shortly after
sold all his expensive ASTRO and other P-25 handhelds. He claims the
PRO-96 works the same and sounds almost as good as the Motorola’s and
also uses the same ?? chip for demodulating or decoding the P-25
digital. He also tried the Uniden equivalent and rejected it completely
because of the crappy audio in digital mode. I just picked up a PRO-96
and am completely thrilled with it. The only thing I miss is the 225 to
400MHz mil band but I still have a PRO-43 that will cover that. If you
want to listen to P-25 digital, I can’t imagine being unhappy with a PRO-96.

CommCtr1 wrote:

I'm in the market for a digital scanner and I'm very loyal to Uniden/Bearcat
for a lot of reasons. I need one that does 9600bps for our local system, but
I'm told the Bearcats need some kind of tuning for them to operate properly
on the APCO25 systems. Can someone fill me in on this?
I'm not a big fan of Radio Shack scanners, I've had a few and they
don't impress me at all. My last one was a Pro-91, what a piece of garbage.
Rx was horrible, programming was a different story. They make the
programming so complex, for something very simple.
I've recently been told the Pro-96 is a better scanner than the 296D, so is
this just a personal opinion, or is it actually true.
Any information would be appreciated.

thnx

In article , Mike wrote:

The only thing I miss is the 225 to 400MHz mil band but I still have
a PRO-43 that will cover that.

I was under the impression that you can use an undocumented PRO-96 "feature"
to open up the 225-400 band. I've also heard that the WIN96 program both
knows how to do this and has a setting to enable it. (I haven't yet used
WIN96 to load frequencies in that band, otherwise I'd know for certain.)

Personally I would not want to program a PRO-96 without using WIN96
(or for that matter, any scanner without using a similarly good program).

- Dan