{"id":1901,"date":"2015-09-18T12:59:07","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1901"},"modified":"2015-09-20T16:52:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T23:52:44","slug":"receiver-review-bearcat-210-xlt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1901","title":{"rendered":"Receiver Review: Bearcat 210 XLT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I bought one of these used for $10 at the Puyallup Hamfest last March, and it&#8217;s been a great addition to my lineup of receivers. I use it to monitor a couple local ham repeaters from the main living room so I won&#8217;t miss a call if I&#8217;m not in the radio room. For that purpose, it&#8217;s a steal of a deal at $10.<\/p>\n<p>It <em>is<\/em> over 20 years old. Which means:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Don&#8217;t assume one you see for sale works. I looked at two at the Hamfest, plugging in and trying both. Good idea, as the one I passed on had some glitches.<\/li>\n<li>No trunking; that technology was in its infancy a quarter-century ago.<\/li>\n<li>No digital modes like P25. Same story as above.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Only&#8221; 40 memory channels in 2 banks, not hundreds in dozens of banks.<\/li>\n<li>No tone or digital squelch, carrier squelch only. Not a terribly big deal, as carrier squelch will still work in such situations.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Wide band&#8221; FM only; it way predates the recent narrowbanding mandate. Not a big deal, just turn up the volume to compensate. Plus the ham repeaters I monitor still all use wide band.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not all bad news, though. It has some nice features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A simple user interface. It doesn&#8217;t have many features, and there&#8217;s basically a dedicated key or control for each one. I didn&#8217;t need to use a manual to figure out how to use it; it&#8217;s that self-explanatory.<\/li>\n<li>A built-in power supply, a big plus if you leave it powered on for extended periods (as one tends to do with a scanner).<\/li>\n<li>A nice bright vacuum-fluorescent display that&#8217;s easy to read in dim conditions.<\/li>\n<li>Decent audio. I can easily hear it anywhere in the main part of the house.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s a scanner, not a general-purpose communications receiver. There&#8217;s no tuning knob or S-meter. It receives FM only in most of its range, and AM only in the air bands. Not a big deal for me, as I bought it to scan FM, and it works just fine for this purpose.<\/p>\n<p>I even sometimes eavesdrop on the local police and fire services with it, because I&#8217;m in one of those areas that&#8217;s never adopted either trunking or digital technology for its public service communications.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, if you can live with their limitations, those old scanners can, as mentioned earlier, be a steal of a deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I bought one of these used for $10 at the Puyallup Hamfest last March, and it&#8217;s been a great addition to my lineup of receivers. I use it to monitor a couple local ham repeaters from the main living room so I won&#8217;t miss a call if I&#8217;m not in the radio room. For that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}