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Poor reception from Uniden UBCD396XT

Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2017 6:03 pm
by matth1000
Hi all,
Just wanted to know if anyone has any Ideas why I cant get much reception using the above listed scanner.
I Live in Landsdale WA about 17km from Perth Airport.
I also have access to a Icom IC-A15 air band radio that I borrowed from work today, (Don't worry I am fully licensed to use it.)
I sat the two radios side by side and the Icom picks up the Tower and approach very easily and clearly.
The Uniden locks onto the channel but producers only static, no clear speech.

I swapped the antenna from the Icom onto the Uniden and the Uniden still didn't work.
I then put the Watson W-801 antenna from the Uniden onto the Icom and the Icom still worked flawlessly.

I am also using an adapter to go from the stock antenna socket of the Uniden to BNC style to use the W-8001 antenna.
For the life of me I cant find the stock rubber ducky antenna that came with the Uniden.

Is there anywhere I can take my scanner to to get it checked out?
I'm at a bit of a loss.

Appreciate any help

Matt.

Re: Poor reception from Uniden UBCD396XT

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:48 am
by vk6hgr
There's probably not anything wrong with the Uniden. As a general purpose receiver, they have to have a very wide RF front end. The up side of this is the tremendous frequency coverage but the down side is that it's not nearly as sensitive as a radio designed and tuned for use on just one band. This is why I use commercial receivers on the Internet streams I provide rather than using cheaper scanners - the performance is a lot better.

You could get an amplifier to boost the input signal a bit for the Uniden to cope, or another idea is to get a $10-20 TV tuner USB stick that can be used with RTL-SDR software. The RTLs are very sensitive (at the cost of RF interference rejection), but would probably out-perform your Uniden. You could also use the RTL to decode ADS-B, too.

Re: Poor reception from Uniden UBCD396XT

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 6:22 pm
by matth1000
Hi, Thanks for the reply.
Do you recommend any particular type of portable scanner that is sensitive enough on air band only.
All I am interested in is airband 118 - 137mhz due to my job, UAV operator.
I don't really want to buy an Icom air band transmitter as I don't need the talk function as we don't do jobs with in 3knm of an airport anyway.
Unless there is a way to disable the transmit function, I wouldn't want to transmit accidentally.

I to sometimes listen to the live streams over the internet but I really need it as portable as possible due to the fact that I am in a different place everyday and working out of a car.

Thanks,
Matt.