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Hi folks,

Figured I had better introduce myself as the new guy, so hopefully I wont get hollered at for asking silly questions.

Just picked up a Uniden BC246T as my first scanner.

I was trying to program Seattle Police and Fire frequencies but keep getting a message saying "out of range" does anyone know why that is?

-Aidan

Welcome to the website !

Seattle is on a trunked radio system, so there are usually 3 steps to program your scanner...

(1) put the scanner into "trunk" mode
(2) put in the radio frequencies (usually the "Columbia simulcast" list will do)
(3) put in the talkgroup ID numbers for the police/fire channels you want to scan.

Look in the trunk programming section of the instruction manual. It should tell you what buttons to press such that you can enter the frequencies/talkgroups.

Click here for the frequency list

Click here for the talkgroup list

Why thank you kind sir!, I will start playing around with it and see what I can do. I am sure I am going to have plenty of questions

Do I have to input all the frequencies? for Columbia Simulcast?

You can enter just the control channel(s) however the radio might want various base/offset values and what not. The downside of this is you risk losing reception should the system administrators decide to change the control channel(s). To make life easier I usually put the whole Columbia Simulcast list in. Its not a big deal considering the frequencies don't change often.

I went ahead put all of the Columbia ones in. I was stumped for awhile trying to figure out how to put in talk groups. Accidentally hit a button and it suddenly dawned on me that I could just punch in the talk groups!

This scanner is really easy to program!.

The default base/offset freqs will be fine. As long as you selected MOT 800 when you created the system you're golden.

After a while you might get sick of text entry--break out the cable that came with it. I like bcTool but others prefer FreeSCAN.