Uniden UBCD396T

Quite a nice little unit – I was given one of these things a couple of months ago as being surplus to requirements so I cannot really comment upon price/performance, but it seems to live up to its reputation if you ignore the marketing fluff such as "25,000 channels" etc. The pre-load feature of AU/NZ channels is quite useful for when I need to reset it with the four-finger salute after mucking it up, but the dead-tree manual is not the most readable (the online one is much better); said manual also has the even/odd pages printed back to front i.e. the odd pages are on the left making it a bit confusing when trying to find a page number. It also eats batteries, so a power supply is really needed for long-term operation. I run ABW (Anything But Windoze) at home, so the software is of no use to me whatsoever; however, I am figuring out how to control it via the serial port but have been unable to locate a programming manual (the morbidly curious can follow my efforts on www.horsfall.org/UBCD396XT.rtf, and any help would be appreciated, but note that it will always be out of date). In short, it's OK but it was a freebie (from my brother, not a dealer; I have no relationship whatsover with Uniden) so its performance is irrelevant.

Update (6/3/18): I've since located the programming manual for the beast, so a program for Unix/Mac/Penguin (that works the way that I think) is well under development; as a result the URL mentioned above is no longer valid.

OK – Like the features of PC control, remote head and all bits come with it like chargers and stuff, but it's very deaf on UHF, very. I'm thinking of returning it for refund. My old PRO96 was far superiof on UHF receive, sorry I sold it. Regards, Mark (markr1@iprimus.com.au) Features and PC control very deaf on UHF straight out of the box very disappointing compared to PRO96

Excellent – Great unit for trunk scanning in digital or analogue.With such a large memory you cannot run out of memory space.Display is a nice size to show all information you would need to view.Free computer software from uniden can be downloaded off their website. Can program all my radio frequencies with such a big memory.All features can be turned on & off via computer control.Nice compact size,solid unit. As mentioned already,a bit quite on audio/signal on UHF.User manual can be a bit hard to understand.