Uniden BCD536HP HomePatrol Series Digital Phase 2 Base/Mobile Scanner with HPDB and Wi-Fi. Simple Programming, TrunkTracker V, S.A.M.E. Emergency/Weather Alert. Covers USA and Canada.

Not cheap, but wow! Can actually work right out of the box, and with your zip code it sets itself up for everything in your area ... of course, you can make personal lists of what to monitor as well quite easily (but you need a PC or laptop to do it easily). very happy with this Christmas give I gave to myself. :)

Easy to set up

This is an expensive unit. Setup was quite easy and when I entered my ZIP code it immediately began scanning. There are many possible complexities and it will take me some time to explore to see whether I can fine tune and expand my searches. UNFORTUNATELY, THE UNIT DOES NOT COME WITH A WI-FI DONGLE AS STATED. Considering the cost of this unit, this is a considerable disappointment and unacceptable.

I like this police scanner. I can get calls from many miles away and close to my home. Its nice to hear all the calls and sometimes hear the outcomes of calls. It has good sound but we wanted more so we added a speaker for better sound and quality to hear in other rooms of the house too. It is hard to get the programming just the way you want it, but with persistence it is workable. It came tightly wrapped and in perfect condition. We have been listening to this radio for up to a year now and no problems. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to hear the calls digitally.

What a scanner! I have had scanners from the day they were presented. This BCD536HD has to be the one that is so impressive. I like the way it hooks up to my PC and the way I can program frequency and favorite channels. Before I purchased this rig I was told that trunk tracking was not in my area. Well the joke is on the one that gave me this info. I hear many trunk frequencys and they use P25. The only thing I dont like is the speaker is underneath. I will purchase an external speaker for a clearer sound. I did purchase the program ARC536PRO and it is a great program for virtual control on PC. I did learn a lot from other users on http://www.radioreference.com/ and video on YouTube.com. If you are thinking of getting this scanner, dont hesitate, it is a great receiver.

First a word of caution: Please be aware that many of the reviews on this page are not for the BCD536HP. Many are for older models of Uniden scanners that have very little in common with the BCD536HP. Why these reviews are here I do not know, but they are. Now for my review. This is a great scanner, easily the best Ive ever owned, and I have owned quite a few dating all the way back to the 1970s. That being said, I will also say its easily the most maligned piece of electronic equipment Ive ever heard of, and that reputation is not entirely unwarranted. This scanner debuted in early 2014 with early adopters finding a number of problems, including defective headphone jacks, and problems with SD cards becoming corrupted. Uniden made good on the headphone jack issue and repaired or replaced the affected units that were returned. The SD card issue seems to be hit or miss, but many who have had the problem have reported that replacing the SD card that came with the scanner with a new one has helped or eliminated the problem entirely. More recently some users have reported that the LCD backlight has dimmed over time. This is worrying, and I find myself trying to use the radio with the backlight either off, or set to its dimmest setting in order to preserve the life of the backlight. Again, this may be an issue that affects some units and not others, but I don’t want to find out the hard way. Another worrying issue is the clock battery. Some have reported their clock battery going dead after a period of months and have been unable to recharge it, or get it to hold a charge. If the clock battery is dead, the radio will require you to enter the date and time each time you turn it on, so while this doesn’t kill the radio it will suck some of the fun out of it. And then of course it took Uniden a year to finally release the Siren app for iPhone, something that was touted as a major new feature when the radio was released. OK, so all that stuff sounds bad, and it is, but I still think this is a great radio. The Siren app is out now and mostly works, at least within your home WIFI network. The headphone jack on my radio is fine. I’ve re-programmed the radio multiple times and had no card failures (I’m using a 32GB card I bought new, keeping the supplied card as a backup.) My clock works fine. The Uniden Sentinel software that comes free is bare-bones but usable. It updates the radio’s firmware easily. The radio scans quickly, it’s UHF and VHF sensitivity is better than I expected it would be based on user comments I’d read. The radio looks and sounds great! It does not look like the “Pinto” of police scanners, which let’s face it, it kind of is. it looks more like a BMW. Very nice fit and finish, very nice design. The feel to the controls is nice & solid, and the very nice display offers more characters to use for your Alpha Tags than ever before. It’s really a wonderful, even refined, radio. I would easily give it 5 stars if it weren’t for all the design and quality control issues that have plagued it, at least did in the past. Now I will say I think a lot of folks will be disappointed in the “Home Patrol” aspect of this radio. Yes it’s touted as a major feature, and yes you can enter your Zip Code and be scanning your local police and fire in minutes. But what I’ve found is it tends to load up a lot of stuff you will not enjoy listening to, which forces the scanner to work its way through a lot of unnecessary channels, slowing the scan cycle way down. Yes, you can hit “Avoid” on stuff, and yes you can select only the types of communications you’re interested in. All that will help, but scanners work best when you PROGRAM THEM. When YOU put in exactly what YOU want to listen to. So my advice is to take the time to learn how to program the radio properly with Sentinel, or with the Butel software (a subscription at radio reference will help if you use Butel). You will enjoy your radio infinitley more when its set up properly. If this is your first scanner, and you live in an area with complex communications systems, you should expect that learning how to program it is going to take some time and effort. It will be time well spent though, and there’s lots of resources online to help. The Marks Easier To Read manual online is a good place to start. Also RadioReference.com is a huge compendium of help and information and informative users. Hope that helps.

I am a scanner newbie, I wanted something to listen in to local police and fire and air. My experience with scanners if very limited. I first bought the RS PRO-652 from my local RS store. I had a heck of a time trying to program this, I basically used search and tune and entered one frequency at a time. Very frustrating, even after reading instructions. I thought Id order this Uniden after reading how simple it was to program. I ordered through Amazon and got it next day. From the time I opened the package and got it working was like 30 minutes. I put in my zip code and it started loading the area database and I was in business. I even found this one picked up distant radios a little better as well. I returned the RS and havent looked back. I have a Apple iPad and can listen to it using the Siren app and even do some programming and other controls with it. I wish they had the Siren for PC or Android. WIth wifi it should be able to connect to the PC wirelessly. My SSID contains several lower/upper case letters and I was unable to figure out how to do caps lock or lower case. So I created a new one using all upper case password. I still am learning with this scanner but so far it seems to be light years ahead of others with the home patrol software built-in. I am able to pick up radios from two counties away, faintly, but I can hear them. So far Ive been very pleased with this scanner.

This unit is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its got fantastic build-quality. It works as it should, scans channels and lets you listen. The buttons and knobs work well. Its a quality unit. Or is it? It might be me, perhaps Im old and stupid, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how to use the favorites system. In a web browser, youre on a page you like, and you hit a button and save it as a favorite. Later, you can go back to it. But this thing has no such button. Instead, it has an elaborate and over-complicated favorite-list system which is impossible for me to understand even after watching countless YouTube videos. The problem is you cant just say Hey, this is interesting, fave it! For goodness sake, Im a computer programmer and I *still* cant understand how to operate the user interface of this thing. Why cant I, for example, just quickly set a frequency / operation mode of my choice like I can on a regular radio? So now it sits here gathering dust instead of being used because the UI is so annoying.

One of the best dugital scanners on the market.

This was supposed to be the greatest ever. Ive had to have two people help me with this. Apparently, all we can do is select my county and I only can get a 30 mile radius reception. It downloads the common frequencies and so far we have not figured out if we can add other ones. It doesnt look like it. I was hoping to have the record function up and working. I first took it to a technician, and he got it sort of configured and set it to record. When it was unplugged and brought to my home everything was lost, I had to get someone else come and configure it again. And we didnt get the record feature operational. Im afraid to do anything to it for fear of losing where it is set to listen to the things I can. I should have bought a much less expensive unit that I could program myself.