Welcome to Scanner School.

My name is Phil Lichtenberger and this podcast is here to teach you everything to know about the scanner radio hobby.

This podcast is available on your favorite podcast player, as well as a video version over on YouTube.

And if you wanna look at any of the session notes from this podcast, you can look at the description down below in your podcast player, this to YouTube channel, or by going to scannerschool.com/session333.

A first question comes in from Matty.

He's looking to put a antenna on his 65 foot tower to pick up both analog and digital signals in the VHF/UHF range.

He's asking what kind of antenna I would recommend to him, how high we should put it, and where to put a pre amplifier on the tower.

Matty, you are one lucky guy having a 65 foot tower available to you to put an antenna up.

Guys like me who have to mount to our tiny little ranch houses are very jealous of you.

Now to start an antenna that I would definitely recommend is a discone antenna.

Now a discone antenna is what we call an equal opportunity offender.

It's very wide as far as what it can receive, and it works phenomenally well for scanner radios because it will receive from about 25 megahertz all the way through about a gig.

but there's very few areas where a discone just does not work well.

So for the value that you're getting and the range that it works in, a discone is the superior choice basically, when it comes to the scanner.

Radio hobby.

This is also why when you go to plenty of air shows, you see when the comms department or the comms booth or the, you know, the, the tent that has all the radios in it, where the air show is operating out of, you'll see discone there and in many other locations, and you can almost pick out anybody who's in the scanner, radio hobby.

Basically by driving through your neighborhood you see a discount.

You know, there's a scanner radio somewhere in that home.

So a discone again works over a wide area of frequencies, which is what makes it the best choice for the scanner radio hobby.

Now, you did mention you wanted to receive analog and digital signals.

So a scanner antenna doesn't care what type of signal you are receiving.

It only cares about the frequency that it has to be resonant on.

So whether it's P25, DMR, analog, am fm, uh, upper or lower sideband, whatever it happens to be, as long as the frequency is something that that antenna can receive, you are good to go.

Since you did ask about a pre amplifier, I would suggest skipping the pre amplifier.

For now, I would rather see you invest in some good quality cable than a pre amplifier, and I would recommend LMR 400.

Now, it's not exactly cheap, it's about.

A buck a foot.

So to go that 65 feet just from your antenna to the ground, $65 plus the run to go inside the house.

Now you can get LMR 400 with connectors already on each end, which does make installation a whole lot easier if you are looking to cut a little bit of corners here with your coax.

You could go RG6, although I would rather see you not do that, but sometimes it is just better to get things up and running than it is to get it right completely outta the box.

'cause again, this is a hobby and we can always come back and we could always upgrade or we could find out what we have now is something that we can live with.

Now, if you did wanna put a pre amplifier.

On your line, it would have to be as close to the antenna as possible.

The best optimal place for that pre amplifier is directly under the antenna.

This is because you want to amplify the raw signal coming to the antenna.

Not all of the noise and loss that's in that coax line.

So that's why you don't want your preamp at the bottom or near your radios.

Plus putting that preem amplifi too close to the radios could oversaturate the signal coming into the receiver and then overloading it, desensing it, and then you won't pick up any signals completely negating the fact that you have a pre amplifier there.

As far as placement on your tower, definitely keep it away from anything that is a transmitter antenna.

So you want to make sure that you're in the cone of silence there underneath a transmitter antenna, or off to the side somehow.

definitely not right next to one.

You also want to double check the distance.

Now again, I'm rusty on this.

I think it's a quarter wave or a half wave.

It's the minimal separation you want here, but again, I'd have to go back and double check that value for you.

So if somebody knows for sure, leave a comment in the YouTube video so that Matty can go back to that and find the answer.

So in a nutshell, here's what I'm suggesting.

A discone antenna.

What make and model I would recommend a Diamond D130NJ.

We have a link for that in the description or you can go to scannerschool.com/d130nj That will take you to Scanner Master's website where we are an affiliate and you can make the purchase right from their website.

As far as coax goes, I would certainly highly recommend LMR 400.

Again, you can get that from Scanner Master by using the same link that we just provided.

Run that from your antenna right down to your radio.

If you wanna put a lightning arrester in there, I highly recommend one of those as well.

put the antenna as high as you can or as high as you are comfortable climbing.

And again, make sure it is not near any transmitter antennas.

I would recommend skipping that pre amplifier for now, and instead investing in good quality coax again, like LMR 400.

Matty, thanks again for emailing me Your question here at Scanner School.

Hopefully I did a good enough job answering it and let me know, uh, how you make out with building your antenna system in your shack.

I'd love to see some pictures of the setup.

And again, I'm jealous that you have a 65 foot tower that you can mount an antenna to.

Maybe one day I will.

I do have a Rohn 25 tower in segments behind my garage, but unfortunately it's horizontal and not vertical.

So, Maddie, thanks again.

Alright, onto our next question.

This question comes in from Lou and he's asking.

I have a Uniden BCD996P2 that will all of a sudden on its own broadcast the weather and stay on the weather until I manually change it to scan.

How can I make this stop?

Is there a setting that has to be changed?

Lou, it sounds like you've got one of two issues going on with that scanner.

The first one can very easily be set accidentally, and the second one is a little bit more deliberate, but it still can happen by chance.

The first one is the Weather alert priority feature on many Uniden radios.

Now on your BCD996.

It's very easily and accidentally enabled by pressing two simple buttons, function.

And two.

Let's go to the B roll and take a look at this.

So we are using a BCT 15.

I know it's not the same radio, but it's the first one that I was able to easily grab.

So on the display here, we are currently sitting on a frequency.

We are not in scan mode.

So if you were scanning, what you would do is you would press the hold button that's over here on the corner, you can't see it 'cause it's behind the function now, but it's the lower button right here on the side.

Now what you're going to do is you're going to press function and then two.

To disable the weather alert feature on the screen.

We do not see the weather alert lit up.

And again, for you guys listening on the podcast, I apologize to you, but we do have the visuals on our YouTube channel.

So what you're going to do while you're not in scan, is you're gonna press the function button.

You're gonna push the function wheel in, and then you're gonna press the number two.

So if I press function, and then two, you'll see it says wx, priority on, and now I have a WX icon in the bottom of the screen.

And again, function two.

Will then turn weather priority off, and then you see at the bottom that the weather alert icon has disappeared.

So we go back into scan mode.

We are not looking for a weather channel.

Now this can also be turned on and turned off via the menu system.

If we go to menu and we scroll down to weather alert, let's see, we got here, weather operation, And then we go into weather alert priority, and again, we could turn this off on through this menu here.

Now the other thing that may be happening here is you might have put a weather channel accidentally into a favorites list.

So the scanner is actually scanning through your, your frequencies that you have in memory or your talk groups that you have in memory, and then it gets to the weather channel and it stops on there.

And of course it won't move until you hit scan again, if.

That is what's happening.

What you're going to want to do is you're gonna wanna hit the lockout button on the scanner.

If you hit it one time, it will temporarily lock out that frequency from the scan list.

When you turn the radio off and turn it back on again, that will then put that memory channel back into your scan list.

So if you wanna permanently lock out that weather channel, You're gonna wanna hit that lockout button twice pretty quickly to permanently lock out that memory channel.

That will prevent the weather channel from being in your scan list if that is where the weather is kind of sneaking in to your scanner radio setup.

So Lou, that's a great question.

I know that can be quite a nuisance for somebody.

And in fact we see it also not with just the weather priority mode, but also with close call, that can happen as well.

And people wonder, why do I start hearing transmissions or you know, frequencies that I'm not trying to monitor?

Why does my radio keep cutting out?

Why does it picket fence?

Why is it every two seconds, it disappears from the frequency and comes back to it?

So that all happens because sometimes we accidentally hit the function button and then we.

Press a button on the radio that sets it into a mode that we weren't expecting.

So your question is unfortunately not unique.

There are other people who have done the exact same thing with their radio accidentally setting up the weather priority alert.

So Lou, thanks again for asking your question and if you have any more for me in the future, please feel free to drop me a line.

Before we get to our last question, I wanna thank our Patreon supporters who have helped keep this podcast going and our transition over to YouTube.

If you wanna help support the podcast, you can do so by going to scannerschool.com/patreon.

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The final question for this week comes in from Jim.

Jim, it is always great to hear from you, and thank you again for asking a question here for the podcast.

Jim writes, my question is about the display on Uniden SDS 100 Those of us that are older are losing our eyesight or having a problem reading the display in bright light or when we are on the move, I can put on my reading glasses, but it would be better to adjust the display.

I know there is no setting to increase the size of the type.

Is there a color display setting that would help with the contrast?

I have tried several choices, but no luck.

Maybe you have a better idea.

Jim, I have one idea that might help you out here, and it is actually already built into the radio.

there are two contrast settings that we can easily hit through our function buttons in the radio, but it's kind of a hidden feature, so unless you know where to find it.

It is not easy to enable.

So if you are following along on YouTube, I am apologizing because I am handholding the camera here and I do apologize for this shaking.

So let's go ahead and swap over to my not so steady cam and go through the process here.

So we have the SDS 100, And it's whatever sequence you have set up right now as far as the, the way it looks, what you're going to do is you're going to press the function button on the side of the scanner so that the F is in the corner.

And then we are going to press and hold the nine key and that will actually toggle a contrast mode where it's going to be white on black and then black on white.

If we press and hold a nine key, a second time pressing a nine key, a third time, will take it right back to the color scheme that we are using currently.

So let's go ahead and press function and we're gonna press and hold nine.

And now it changed to a black and white.

And again, since function now has turned off, I'll press function again.

I will press and hold nine.

And now it inverted that color scheme.

We will do a better job with this over on our shorts.

So if you are watching us on YouTube to digest our short form content, or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, We will put a video out at a later date on how to do this with a much better camera that is not moving back and forth.

So make sure you follow us on one of those social media platforms.

You can find us on all of them by just searching for Scanner School, one word Jim, let me know if that is what you were looking for.

and I know on the image I just showed, we had the more advanced screen set up with more details.

So if you use the basic view on the, uh, scanner, it might be easier to see than what I was showing.

I just like having more details on my screen than having the, the bigger fonts.

Not that I can read it any easier than you can, it's just I like to overwhelm myself with too much information.

Jim, thanks again for asking the question and again for your continued support and I think from being with me since day one, I really do appreciate it.

Alright, that wraps up another session of Ask Scanner School.

Again.

You can ask me a question for the podcast by going to scannerschool.com/ask and submitting your question to me.

Or you can go over to Scanner School dot com and just click on the contact form.

You can also reach me there as well.

You.

Don't forget, you can subscribe to our short form content on any social media platform such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Again, we are @scannerschool on all four platforms.

If you wanna take this podcast with you on the go, you can do so on your favorite podcast player using your favorite smart device.

And don't forget to check us out over on YouTube for videos and live streams and everything else that is video related.

and we'll catch you all again next week for the next session of Scanner School.

My name is Phil and I am your resident ScanNerd here online to help you with Scanner Radio.

Hobby 73.