Uniden BC355N 300-Channel Base/Mobile Scanner, Close Call Capture, Pre-programmed Search Bands, NOAA Weather, Aviation, Marine, Railroad, NASCAR, and 'Non-digital' emergency services

This is a no frills basic scanner that works great for anyone in an area that has police and fire still on analog frequencies. Really simple to program; don't believe the naysayers that say it isn't. A simple 3 minute youtube video showed me how to do it. Its a bit time consuming and repetitive but very very easy once you know how. If you plan to listen to over 25 or so frequencies right of the bat, you might want to invest in a programming cable and download programming software. Also, it does have a TOTAL of 300 slots to program frequencies BUT 200 of these are under the Air/Marine slot. It is a bit confusing and if you want to listen to more than 100 frequencies and have to spill over to the Air/Marine presets, you will have to set the scanner to scan your "private" frequencies along with both the "Air" and "Marine" band presets. Its confusing I know, but it DOES have 300 memory slots. If some folks read the free downloadable user manual before purchasing, they would have known that. If you are listening to that many frequencies though, you should probably invest in a better, higher end scanner that has a larger custom memory bank. Its pretty small and takes up very little space on my nightstand and workbench. Worthwhile if you are like me and only listen to around 15 or 20 of the local police/fire/EMS frequencies. If that is all you are looking for out of your scanner, this will do the job. Upon arrival, the box included the scanner, a base telescopic antenna that plugs straight into the back (works well for me, your results may vary with location), a mobile mounting bracket with several feet of fused power wire, a DC cigarette power adapter for quick "plug and go" mobile installation, and finally a second antenna. The second antenna is basically a copper wire with suction cups on both ends and several feet of coax attached to it. According to the directions, you basically suction cup the antenna to the inside windshield on the passenger side of the vehicle or to the rear widow if you drive a standard cab truck. I currently use it in my basement window to gain better reception during the evening when I am working downstairs in my concrete surrounded shop space. Having an additional antenna stuck up in the window really helps improve the reception. Overall, its simple, it works, and its not crazy expensive because of too many bells and whistles I won't use.

I plan on doing a longer review on this product very soon but for now these are my thoughts after 3 days of use as a desktop unit. 1- Programming: I almost did not buy this item after reading the reviews about programming it. The thing was though that the BC355N fit my needs and area to perfection so I went ahead and bought it knowing that as an Amazon Prime member it could be returned without much hassle. My worries went unfounded as it was a breeze to program after watching the Uniden You Tube Channel video on how to do so, it is less than 2 minutes long. After about 10 minutes I had all my local channels programmed in and was listening to them. 2- Antenna: I also bought an aftermarket antenna for $10 to see if it was all it was described as in the reviews for it since I do live pretty far out in the country. Hands down it out performed the stock antenna this unit comes with but that is not a bad review on what it comes with as it worked as well as the other as far as reception but it did not have the adjustments that the aftermarket one has and you will need that with the angle that the BC355N sits on your desk at. 3- Overall: Very happy with the quality / feel of the unit, it looks good sitting on my desk in my office and matches all the other electronics that surround it as I do both FM and Internet Radio. Shipping was fast with Prime 2 Day and it was packaged very well.

It's an okay scanner. It is very (very) difficult to program specific frequencies you want. For me, I was hoping to program it for GMRS frequencies and Civil Air Patrol frequencies. (462 Mhz, 26.62 Mhz, 144.5 Mhz) Using the lock out feature to do this won't work because you are limited to 100 total lockouts. It would be nice if I could use a computer to program the radio......But, the price of the unit would double. It's not useful for police, fire, and other services.

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.

This is a very aggravating thing!!! It will not allow me to enter any codes for my local fire departments at all. I have tried and tried , some of my fire department personnel have also tried to set the codes, and they will not stay in or even be accepted in this thing. I am very disappointed in this item as I have had two other bear cat scanners prior to this one. I would love to return the piece of crap, but it’s past my time to do so if you do not mind listening to nonstop, static or not programming in your local codes, I suggest not buying this.

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.

Up front: this is an older model, and does not receive digital transmissions. But with that being known ahead of time, this scanner is simply the best, easiest, and highly usable for my purposes. I wanted something that would be great for use in my travel trailer. I need to go to a new area and pick up whatever local stations are transmitting. I want to hear the cops and fire, but also ham radio repeaters, and aircraft from time to time. And it even gets CB which is something I might need too. The "close call" feature is great, as expected, for those times when there are mystery stations nearby such as the security guard in the RV park chasing someone, or hams at a hamfest QSYing where they think it's a private freq). Big features I like are a) programming searched out channels into a bank, b) storing my own favorite freqs into the "private" bank, no matter what the service (air, AND fire, AND ham 146.52, AND FRS, AND CB ch. 19 for example), and c) a pretty fast scan rate, and d) a very sensitive receiver. It's small, low power requirements, and can run on 12V or uses the 115 adapter. It also includes a couple of antennas, for flexibility where it is sitting on the bench at home, or in the car. You can "scan everything" and then cut out band-by-band that you don't want to monitor right now. One tradeoff is that there is no direct frequency entry mode, but that means there are 10 less buttons on the front panel, and for a small radio like this, that is really a plus, not a minus. Ultimately, "would I buy another one if this one was broken or stolen or I gave it away?" Absolutely. It's exactly what I wanted when I bought it, and I'm 100% happy with everything about it (including Amazon's price, as usual). If you're thinking of getting this as a gift for someone, check first to see if their local services use digital radios. This varies all over the country.

I wanted a scanner for a long time. I use to pull up radio reference and listen to the stream of my local police traffic but the quality was bad and unreliable. This scanner appealed to be because I wanted one like this style, not the portable radio looking ones, as well as the feature of being able to use it in the home and car. It took me a little while to figure out how to use it even with the instructions but after 10-20 minutes I had my local sheriffs dept. tuned in. I was so happy, the quality was 100x better than the internet stream, it sounded like they were right next to me compared to what the stream sounded like. I was impressed by the amount of accessories that were included with the scanner. Most companies would require you to purchase all the stuff that was included with this. There was a car antenna, a house antenna, AC adapter, DC adapter, and a hard wire kit for the car. I purchased a different antenna for the top of the car as well as a speaker. The only wish I have is that it went a little louder, when your in the car and driving at 60-75 MPH its hard to hear with the road noise. If you have it you can plus your AUX in for your car and have it come across your speakers but it'll only come out of one side. I don't know anything about scanners but I'm 100% happy with my purchase. Its something I've wanted for a long time and it does exactly what I wanted. Don't be discouraged if you have trouble figuring it out at first. The instructions don't cover everything so you sort of have to teach yourself some things.

Perfect condition and excellent working.

lo scanner funziona molto bene e copre le frequenze più interessanti, unica pecca e' che bisogna stare attenti all'alimentatore in dotazione, ha la spina americana con le due lamelle e supporta i 120 volt, l'ho subito cambiato con un alimentatore universale, per il resto e' tutto ok!!!

Great scanner! I bought this specifically to monitor air band transmissions, because my daughter is working on her commercial pilot licence. If you plan on using it for air band you'll have to buy a decent external antenna. The antenna that comes with it isn't up to the task. I'm using an antenna specifically for air band 108Mhz - 136Mhz from "DPD Productions" which I mounted on my chimney. The internal speaker is pretty good, but I decided to buy a Cleartone MFJ-281 external speaker which is designed to work best in the frequency range of the human voice. One of my friends is an airline pilot and he was very impressed by how it performed.

Muy satisfecho con el radio, me gusto mucho su funcionalidad, funciona a la perfección y la marca es garantía.

If u r in canada don't bother it dont work don't wast your money I got it....it worked for a week now its just a dust collection item can't use it for nothing