DX on the little scanner...

[djrebel236]

does anybody eles hear skip on your scanner? it comes in on the 33mhz zone, almost whipping out local 911 center + fire bands, and sometimes i get the skip in the 155mhz zone, almost whipping out the local police dept...Dj

[djrebel236]

i forgot to add, does anybody pick up harmonics from your local FM or AM radio stations on your base station?...Dj

[DX47]

I pick up tons of harmonics on the 2 meter band, 144-148 due to the local pager systems and taxi companys or whatever around here. It does not help that I live right in the middle of town, and next to the down town area.
I got a band pass filter to solve the problem.

As for the skip, not recently, but we don't have many services left around the 30mhz area in more to listen to

[samskip]

I hear the occasional skip on the police/fire bands (154/155 mhz) area, like once every month or two under the right conditions. Usually its repeaters from other cities about 50-100 miles away. It's not impossible, but not frequent....

[djrebel236]

the local pager systems

boy those pagers are a nuscence on most of the bands here, some in the 30-60mhz, and scattered about the rest of the bands and not just 2 meters, im not sure if its cause more and more cell towers going up or if more people are buying pagers...Dj

[DX47]

They need to kill them off, who the heck uses a pager these days? They should convert them over to some sort of digital output anyway instead of the endless tones.

[DX47]

They need to kill them off, who the heck uses a pager these days?

[djrebel236]

i agree with ya bro, people in these neck of the woods use them just as much as the cell phones, come to think of it, some cell co. have added the pager system into there cell phones...73's Dj

[dud muck]

Due to their wide-band nature, scanners are susceptible to strong signal overload.
Often an interfering signal doesn't exist on the frequency you're on, its image reception and has to do with the intermediate frequencies used in the scanner.
Another problem is two strong signals received can mix in your scanner and be heard both on seemingly random frequencies.
Often heard is paging signals because they transmit so often with a powerful signal.

So if you're hearing something wiping out your reception, care must be taken its not an image or strong signal overload on another frequency.

CB radios usually aren't bothered by such things because they are tuned and/or filtered to only operate in the 27MHz area.

[RAPNEK]

Old post but it could be the ant. you are using. I run my scanner on a vhf ant most of the time on my truck. If I switch it over to the uhf or 102" steel whip I get a lot more skip and unwanted signals.

[djrebel236]

thats ok, we can all use the new info. on most of my scanners i have a 800mhz rubber duck bnc antenna, only one of them is on a discone antenna which is in the attic, weird thing is my handhelds are the ones picking up the skip, go figure...Dj

[crazytruker]

Yo dj, sup? Before Butler County went from 33.82 mhz dispatch to 400 mhz they used to receive skip from California. This is going back quite some years as Butler and I'm sure Cali. have gone to higher bands but the 911 dispatchers could hear fire calls being dispatched in Cali. by a dispatch center running the same freq.