Home > Consumer Reviews > Uniden BC898T 500 Channel Programmable Base Scanner with TrunkTracker III

I know that there is only a bad review so I had to write this. This is a great first scanner. It is very sensitive, picks up all calls from across town and does most of what you want. alpha tagging would be great, but you can do that with a software package, no biggie. I got this because I wanted a scanner for home use, not mobile use, I didn't want anything with batteries. This fit the bill. You find out a lot about truncked systems and this thing picks all of them up. Very Highly recommended

As an Amateur Radio Operator, I own and have owned many scanners. This is one of my keepers. It outperforms almost all of my other radios. It does not have all the features of radios costing more, such as text tagging and digital capabilities, but what it can do, it does very well. At its current sub-$175 price, it's a bargain. This radio has been out for awhile now, and a firmware update has corrected the issues that the radio originally had with DCS/CTCSS decoding.

All its cracked up to be and then some. Pretty good manual, although I found a programming shortcut using Google. I bought a dipole antenna and it did improve the reception significantly. Weather alert programming is dead easy too.
Yes, I'd buy it again.

I should've paid closer attention to William "Macintosh Gamer's" negative comment about the BC898T's Line-Out feature, in that it clips off the first couple of seconds of each & every transmission that's received!! Also as he mentions, that "pop" becomes quite annoying.

I purhcased this scanner solely for the purpose of providing an Internet feed from it. But I'm unable to use this scanner for this purpose now, so it's going back for an exchange.

I read R. Mason's comment about this (and other) problems having been rectified now with serial numbers beginning with 6 (and above I assume), which indicates that those scanners were manufactured in 2006.

What puzzles me is, R. Mason mentioned that his model was from 2004, and has since rectified the problem by exchanging it with a new one manufactured in 2006. Well, here we are in 2008, and my brand new scanner that I received from Amazon yesterday has a serial number beginning with 3. Does that mean that it was manufactured in 2003 ... 5 years ago??? A distinct possibility, as this scanner is plagued with the same problems mentioned by William. The firmware in my unit, incidentally, is U1.29

Amazon's return/exchange policy is fantastic, and I thank them for that. However, I'm going to lose close to $100 in shipping & duty charges to & from here (Bermuda), but I have no choice as this model of scanner is totally & 100% useless to me. I just hope that the BCT15 that I want to exchange this for doesn't have the same problem.

Other than that, it's a pretty decent unit. Just don't plan on placing it above eye-level, because the LCD's contrast is such that you won't be able to read the display. At eye-level and even 45° above it's very readable, though.

I've only programmed in 10 frquencies of the VHF and UHF Aircraft bands into 1 memory bank, so I haven't tried anything else & can't comment on them.

The 500 channels provide more than enough space for even the busiest areas. The CTCSS/DCS feature is great for filtering out the unwanted frequencies. The good part about this feature was that it would scan this as well as the frequency, so even if you know a frequency, you can scan for the tone (which is most always harder to get.)

Too bad that Uniden didn't package the software with the scanner (about $30 from their site). For the price, I would have thought they would have kicked in for the software and the cable (about $4 at most electronic stores.)

Had most all the features I was looking for, and the price wasn't that bad either. I'd recommend this for just about anyone.