On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:30:15 -0700, you wrote:

>     I was talking to some of my friends (sighted) and the topic of =
>scanners came up. It turns out that they may be wanting to buy a hand =
>held scanner. So often this is a first step in to becoming hams that I =
>am very encouraged. The one thing I do wonder is what brand and mottle =
>of hand held scanner is a good one with out breaking the bank?

The following is not meant to be a buyer's or user's guide, just my
own experiences after hamming and scanning for over 40 years.

Firstly what scanner you choose to purchase will largely depend on
what's listenable in your area of the country.  You wouldn't
necessarily want (or need) to buy a radio that's capable of picking up
or decoding more things than you'll ever find to listen to, unless you
were planning to travel with it, or move to another area that has
those kinds of transmissions and you want to monitor them.  For
instance, I own a Uniden BCD996T and two BCD396T's, both tops of their
line (base and portable) which I get a lot of enjoyment out of using
here in New York City where there's lots of both trunked and analog
systems to listen to.  Digital (APCO P25) hasn't really caught on here
yet, except for a couple repeaters in New Jersey which are running it,
and there's not a scanner on the market that does D-Star yet, so if
you have a lot of amature repeaters in your area that are D-Star, no
scanner on the market will help there.  Ditto Open Sky, but that
particular protocol is in a lot of heat and disfavor recently because
of costs and problems, but if your county uses it, then even the most
modern scanner won't help you as Open Sky hasn't been licensed for
placement in the consumer market.

The GRE/Radio Shack scanners (PSR500/600 and Pro-106/107's
respectively) are also fine, fine units.  Their features differ
slightly from the Uniden models that receive the same things, and some
folks like them better.

You'll pay about $500 retail for any of the radios I mentioned above.
Each of these models have stripped-down little-brother versions which
receive fewer frequencies, some don't do APCO P25, various cut-downs
available, with price reductions to match.  About the cheapest digital
scanner I've seen is in the $300 range.

Of course, if you live in a place where digital transmission hasn't
come to call yet, then find yourself a ham fest somewhere, where
there's surely somebody selling an old non-digital scanner, but
digital scanning has been in the mainstream now for well over five
years, so the number of non-digital radios on the used market is
starting to decline.  If you don't mind used equipment, though, you
can probably start picking up older-model digitals for half to
three-quarters the price of the newest models, and you'll get at least
95% of the features of the newies on the oldies.  The second-gen
digitals' improvements are only slightly incremental over the
first-gen models.

Hope this helps.