Uniden BC355N 300-Channel Base/Mobile Scanner, Close Call Capture, Pre-programmed Search “Action” Bands to Hear Non-Digital Police, Ambulance, Fire, Amateur Radio, Public Utilities, Weather & more

I got this scanner to listen to the local emergency channels as well as the storm spotter stations. It is always nice to know what is going on in the area as I am a first responder. There are days I like to follow big fires as some times we are called in for mutual aid, so it gives me a good snap shot of what to expect if a MABAS is called.I do believe that the location for this is good to note as well. I live in a semi rural area surrounded by a lot of forestry land and bluffs, my scanner is by my desk in the basement with just the basic pull out antenna attached. So far it has had no issues getting very good signal, even in snow, rain, heavy winds, and summertime tree cover. Some days I actually hear the calls paging us for a fire on the scanner before my actual pager picks up the page and sounds off.The programming is not hard, I had absolutely no issues getting the local frequencies programmed into the private selection. The little instruction booklet that came with it was pretty fairly easy to comprehend when it came to setting frequencies into the private section, not really sure why this particular function had so many negative reviews about it being confusing. This is my first scanner and from unboxing to being up and running with all the local frequencies installed it took maybe an hour, this includes assembly, running the cord, attaching the antenna and looking up and saving the 15 or so local frequencies.It comes with the power and antenna capabilities to use in the house or while on the road. It is pretty nice using it on long road trips to hear about what is going on in front of you. The weather channels are nice too as you can follow the weather alerts from the NWS in real time. We get frequent tornadic weather, so this is nice to have in the basement to have a decent heads up in the event of natural disasters.Overall I am pleased, my kids love to listen in when we get a fire call, it gives me the alerts that I want. It is pretty easy to operate. If you are looking for a basic analog (not digital) scanner. It has ran daily since I got it and I have not had any issues at all. If I had to throw a negative in there, it would be a stretch with saying the sound gets a bit crackly for a few seconds, but then I have to remember where it is and it is pulling in analog.I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a basic scanner.

The idiot town i live in almost burned to the ground, and the only updates they were giving about the fires were on social media. Bought this afterwards so I could actually get information without social media. Works for now.

Looks good. But am having trouble understanding how it works to scan police.

I'm sure these worked at some point in the past, but don't waste your money. These are analog scanners and most agencies have gone completely to digital and trunked systems, which makes this scanner useless. It's old technology. I've tried to pick up signals on the miriad of antennas I own, and can't pick up a signal at all, except weather channels and the occasional CB bands. Even those come through horribly. I have several wideband antennas, including my main discone antenna 30ft above my house. I've but the bullet and invested in an SDR scanner, specifically the uniden sds200 (not cheap but worth it's weight in gold) and it works flawlessly. I'll hold onto this solely for weather, but I wish I could return it at this point I don't even know why they still sell them...

Easy set up to program

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 wasn't until I started to program it that I realized it's massive flaw. I honestly don't 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, that's a 20 second round trip. What's 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 can't disable.So what does this mean? Well you can't 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 don't recommend this scanner at all and I really can't believe it was built this way. A simple setting to turn off pre-programmed banks would make things so much easier.

Product perfect. Upon trying to set frequencies, by some fluke in programming at mfg, some fcc local frequencies were not entered. My luck,1 in a million. Called company they checked every option and said to return it to shipper. Couldn't ask for better customer service. If it is man made it is not perfect! Thanks C S for a great response!!