Uniden BC365CRS 500 Channel Scanner and Alarm Clock with Snooze, Sleep, and FM Radio with Weather Alert, Search Bands Commonly used for Police, Fire/EMS, Aircraft, Radio, and Marine Transmissions

Easy to use and picks up all of my local frequencies no problem

instruction manual not so good but a little button pushing needs practice. the instructions dont follow through with all necessary scenario steps necessary. mine does run on batteries. three fresh ones lasted a touch over 15 hours. reception is real good with magnetic base antenna up on top my of bird cage and its downstairs ground level + maybe six feet higher than ground level. audio quality is as expected pretty good. uniden should expand on this form factor. its an attractive rig. a more complete frequency spectrum radio would be rather nice to own with the scanner ability as well. i seldom give five stars and didnt think it deserves five but four reflects needed expansions.

The scanner is a little hard to program at first, but once you get used to it, it goes well. Great product!

Programming this scanner was so easy!! Absolutely would purchase again!

Bought this as a replacement for a failing (after decades of service) Bearcat BC-300 (the undisputed King of the Scanners in its day). Understand this is NOT a digital scanner, so if you live in a high-end metro environment where the first responders run expensive digital gear - no, this wont work for you. Lots of smaller towns and urban/rural areas still run analog radios, however, and in those areas this scanner will work just fine. It has narrow-band capability (e.g., not just 33.700 but 33.7005 delineation), along with weather capability (including the ability to announce weather alerts) and a clock with alarm and snooze too. Not as easy to program as some other scanners, so read the manual! Sound quality is decent, but better with an external speaker (easily attached via the rear 3mm jack). No complaints at all about the service-bands performance, and even the air-bands reception is pretty good. IMHO - a pretty doggoned-good bang for your $$.

For openers, the audio quality could be improved. My handheld sounds better and even has a larger speaker. That speaker is tiny. Dont complain about no trunking capability. You get what you pay for! Trunking scanners normally cost $300-$500. For about the $60 you pay, dont expect digital or trunking. The BNC antenna falls down, unless you have the antenna horizontal. The bayonet slots should have been alligned differently to allow the antenna to stand up on its own. There are very good memory banks for scanning (10 banks x 50) channels. The FM radio has 3 banks x 10. This leads me to ask about why is FM even a feature? I suppose since the scanner covers those frequencies, it may as well include the in-between band. It does have a broad range of frequencies. Given the sound quality, I doubt anyone would want to hear music. I can understand including NOAA Weather; but FM? Why the clock-radio functionality? Im not sure I want to wake up to reports of an MVA on the freeway with possible casualties. IDK. As I mentioned before, it covers a broad range: HF,VHF,UHF. 10 Meters,6 Meters, FM, Air, 2 Meters, 70 centimeters, GMRS, police, fire,EMS,Business land mobile, marine, MURS. Heck it even covers cordless phones and baby monitors! Good fast scan time. The manual isnt well written. I had to re-read it many times. Dont complain about frequencies not pre-programmed. How can any seller or manufacturer know what area anyone will use it? Impossible. Hint: Use the FCC ULS database search to find frequencies you want. (FCC.GOV) Bottom line: You get what you pay for. PS: Dont you DARE use the antenna to transmit! In the first place the connector is not a true BNC connector. It just looks like a BNC. It wont twist-lock onto a real BNC. Secondly the SWR is BAD BAD BAD it gave me a 5.1 to 1 ratio. That kind of SWR will fry your transmitter finals. Just use it for the scanner. I was hoping to share the antenna for 2 meters with the scanner as the receiver and a 5 watt QRP transmitter going into an antenna switch. Bad idea.

It is easy enough to locate the local frequencies which you may want to cover. I do not usually read user guides, but I followed this one closely. I consider myself tech savvy, but this was difficult to set up and is still not fully set up. We want this functionality but are not getting good use of the device because the setup information is so poorly informative. It stays off all the time. Setup is on my to-do list, but its been several weeks.

A great update to replace my old realistic Scanners Easy to program many many features I especially like the battery back up when the power goes out during storms I still receive my emergency services calls for hours and hours In fact, I purchased two additional scanners after I tried the first one I now have a total of three

The scanner is easy to set up and works very well. Uniden is a good brand. Before this one I had a 16 channel that I got in 1992 and it still works flawlessly. I just upgraded because I wanted something a little newer because my mom wanted the older one