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Getting a Scanner?What Kind? How many useing one?
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There's nothing 'fancy' about the normal railroad frequencies. A lot of the current scanners have features like trunk tracking and can handle digital signals that many police and fire agencies use. With the bells and whistles the price tags range in the $300-$500 range. All those extra features don't apply to the rail channels as they are now. I've found that any scanner that is capable of receiving the VHF hi band, where the rail freqs are, works fine. In my experience the one thing that makes a cheap scanner (I got an old Uniden handheld for $25 at a garage sale) as good or better than a pricey one is a good antenna. The 'rubber ducky' antennas that come with most scanners are designed to receive all frequencies that the scanner can receive, and aren't optimized or tuned to a specfic range. As mentioned above a good, specialized antenna will make a world of diffence. On my old Uniden with it's original antenna I can get about 75% of the dispatcher traffic, but have to be within a mile or so of a train to hear them. With the external gutter mount antenna tuned to approx 160mhz I can hear virutally all dispatcher traffic and trains and detectors 5 to 8 miles away. <br />
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