Hi Group,

Well, once upon a time, I was a real scanner aficionado.  I had the 
original Bear Cat BCH.  It had 8 crystal capability, a scan manual 
switch, a step switch while in manual mode and that's about it. There 
was no delay either overall or per channel.  The manual also said that 
you could not put crystals in the radio that were more than 10 MHz 
apart; otherwise, the radio would not function properly.

I played around with both the Bearcat 101 and the Regency referred to 
with the combs and frankly, I didn't like either of them.  In the area 
where I lived, there is a lot of stray RF.  I thought that neither of 
those models had a good front end.  There was a lot of inter 
modulation.  Local FM stations combining with strong mobile phone 
signals were one primary culprit.

I also had the Tunnelac II.  It was a programmable radio with 2 number 
keys: a one and a zero.  You received a book with the proper binary 
codes for all the frequencies.  Like the BC 101 and Regency, you could 
get it to go between listed frequencies and to a degree it would go out 
of the advertised band and frequency ranges.  AIt was supposed to cover 
30-50 MHz, 118-174 MHz, and 420-512 MHz.  But you could get it to accept 
frequencies between those ranges.  It didn't receive overly well on some 
frequencies far from the authorized ranges, but it did receive something.

Again with this Tunnelac, I found the front end poor.  It wasn't until 
the Bearcat 210 (no xl) which was a 10 channel programmable radio with 
direct keypad entry that I felt the micro processing got to the point 
where the front end of such units became acceptable--at least in my area.

That's my early scanning story.


On 4/13/2015 8:49 PM, Jim Gammon wrote:
> John, a ham friend of mine had one of those bearcat scanners and
> as I remember, they ran very warm temperature wise and also had a
> lot of synthesizer noise.  The Regency model ran much cooler and
> as I recall, didn't have nearly as much background noise on
> signals.  Jim WA6EKS
>
>   ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John J.  Jacques" <[log in to unmask]
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date sent: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 15:10:44 -0700
> Subject: Re: Old Regency scanner and Optacon
>
> Hi Jim, I remember that scanner, it was a hot receiver, as I
> recall!  I
> also had a Barecat 101, or 100, that used the same idea, but was
> programmed with the 16 channel lock-out switches on the front,
> and had
> one of the hottest receivers I have ever seen in a scanner!  I
> used to
> know the formula to convert the frequency to that binary number,
> so I
> could make the scanner go to frequencies that weren't listed in
> the book!
>
> 73:
> John
>
> John Jacques
> Amateur Radio Station: KD8PC
> "Whare Cat Is, Is civilization!"
> Robert A Heinlein
> http://www.johnjacques.weebly.com
>


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