Comparison of Airband Scanners

This is a comparison of the signal reception quality from three different airband radio scanners (108 - 137 MHz). The models are:

• ICOM IC-A6 handlehd transceiver
• Uniden Bearcat BC340CRS base scanner
• RadioShack PRO-84 handheld scanner

ICOM IC-A6 ($275)

Uniden Bearcat BC340CRS ($80)

RadioShack PRO-84 ($70)

Transceiver vs Scanner

How the test was done

Conclusion

The reception was vastly better on the ICOM. Of course that is to be expected from a higher-priced unit, but my impression was that the performance significantly outran the price difference. This is probably due to the fact that the ICOM-A6 circuitry is optimized for the aviation band, whereas the other models had to make a compromise across many bands.

From a roof mount antenna (roughly 30 ft AGL) the ICOM unit can receive ground stations as far way as 40 NM. The other two models could not reliably receive stations that were 7 NM away, and I many times could hear music from commercial broadcast stations bleeding through.

The ICOM unit can receive aircraft transmissions from much farther away, even as far away as 100 NM. The other models also do better with aircraft transmissions. But a quantitative comparison is hard to make because it is impossible to do repeated observations from the same aircraft transmission.

Recording Samples