Discone's are also better for the older scanners as well as todays GRE made scanners as they don't cause quite as much intermod or overload. Just getting the antenna outdoors and up higher can make a huge difference. If the station you are monitoring has narrowbanded, then setting the scanner 5 kHz off center will not work very well.įor general use, a discone type antenna will work although they offer no gain.
Sometimes the extra 5 kHz is just enough to mask the off freq user and still allow you to hear the intended signal. Sometimes you can program them 5 kHz higher or lower if than the frequency you want if there is a narrowband user near you that is bleeding into your channel. That is because they only have a standard wideband front end. They will also pickup users on the new narrowband channels if there are any near you. If you are out and away from the urban area, I'd hook up some type of outdoor antenna to it and scan away. They actually have good receivers in them and will often outperform today's digital models but be warned that they are only double conversion so they will be more prone to intermod from other nearby transmitters if you live in an urban area with lots of RF activity. Then you could attach an external antenna to it. Radioshack sells adapters that will plug into those old scanners and convert it to BNC or SO-239 (UHF). You will need an adapter that radioshack sells as they used to old Motorola car radio type jack for the antenna input. Mine are all hooked to an outdoor antenna but I use Stridsberg multicoupler to tie the all together. You won't really improve them any by swapping the antenna with something else unless you go external and mount an antenna outdoors. I mainly use them for monitoring our local fire and county PD as well as the states low band system. They all have great sounding audio compared to today's scanners.
I still have working 210, 220, 250 and 300's here.
Yep, those old scanners had the adjustable metal whips that stuck out through the top of the cabinet.
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