I recently traveled out of my local (repeater) area to the Wasatch mountains in Utah, and had a positive experience using a handheld scanner to supplement playing ham radio.

About a year ago, I traveled to this area. Prior to traveling, I did what most responsible hams would do – I opened up CHIRP, did a proximity search on Repeater Book of my target area, and programmed in the local repeaters. When I got there, I heard nothing on the repeaters. Since I was in the mountains, deep in Little Cottonwood canyon most of the time, I expected this issue. I didn’t play ham radio when we weren’t at our hotel, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to hear or take part in banter when in Salt Lake City, where I regularly can at least connect to a WinLink machine from my Boulder, Colorado QTH.

So fast forward to this year. My Alinco and Baofeng HT’s search (as opposed to scan) really slow. Slow enough to miss activity. So I searched for a proper handheld scanner and found a deal on CraigsList that I couldn’t refuse – especially since I was able to stop by my local Denver Ham Radio Outlet on the way to see Craig.

A few definitions are in order:

scan: quickly go through programmed frequencies (i.e. known repeater outputs)

search: All frequencies in a given range/band (i.e. I don’t now who talks on what)

So I figured out that I really wanted to search, not scan, really. I read through the manual and learned how to use the search feature, and instructed my scanner to search through the 2m and 70cm ham bands. There’s also options to search other bands as well like:

1. Police
2. Fire/Emergency
3. Ham
4. Railroad
5. Civil Air
6. Military Air
7. CB
8. GMRS/MURS/FRS

There’s probably others. I have searched and listened to other interesting bands like Police, Fire, Railroad. Railroad was interesting, but Fire/Emergency is the most interesting – especially when there’s a natural disaster (forest fire) happening and all the coordination around it.

Police band isn’t interesting to me really, and listening to it makes you wonder what is wrong with people these days with all the crazy stuff that happens around here.

Ok so this time when we traveled to Snowbird, even though I set my HT’s to scan (programmed frequencies), I was able to use my handheld scanner to actually find a local repeater that I hadn’t programmed in! This repeater was pretty active while others weren’t active at all.

I looked up the repeater in Repeaterbook and wondered why CHIRP hadn’t included it in my proximity query. This is probably what the main problem was a year ago – the one active repeater I could hear in the canyon was not in the query result.

So I programmed in the repeater and when I had time (when my XYL was busy) I would listen for a Net so I could check-in at least. Interestingly, it was a 70cm repeater about 20 miles away. Maybe it had less multipath issues in the mountains? Who knows.

So I would say, if you don’t have a good (fast) scanning/searching HT, then buy yourself a cheap analog scanner to go along with it.

I’m looking for a HT that can search quickly like my scanner, because I don’t want to carry multiple HT’s if I can help it. I’m looking at a Yaesu VX6R but not sure if it can search/scan fast, unlike by Baofengs.

73,

AE0RS