Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a little stunned by the bad reviews. I couldn't disagree more. This is a great scanner. For the roughly 100 bucks, you really get a lot. It's handheld, which means it travels nicely. It's great for road trips and can keep you in the loop on weather, accidents, and umm, "other" police activities. It scans CB, FRS/GMRS/MURS and HAM bands which covers pretty much all of the individual use bands. The first two (CB, FRS/GMRS/MURS) are pretty useful on trips too. It's rechargeable, and uses standard AA Ni-MH batteries (included) and you can recharge the batteries right in the scanner from a USB port. You can charge while it's on. Also, just in case it matters, you can run it directly from the USB port without any batteries installed at all! Of course, in a pinch you can always use regular non-rechargeable AA batteries which are pretty much the most common batteries in America. There's a switch inside the battery compartment to tell the scanner what kind of batteries you have so that it won't try to recharge regular batteries. (I know, too much time on batteries but I can't help it. A scanner's no good if you can't turn it on!) There are some nice storage features for storing "found" stations and you can program them in manually too, if you know the frequency. You can name all the stations as well. Additionally, there's are banks of per-programmed frequencies for different uses (fire, police, CB, etc.) to allow you to get started right away. (If you're looking for frequencies just google "scanner frequencies" and the city or area you live in. Pretty simple...) But really, it's connecting to the PC that has me won over. *All* of the settings can be accessed through the PC software available from the website. (The website also includes the *manual* <ahem>, drivers, and firmware updates. The software isn't all that sexy to be sure, but it's plenty functional! It's a lot easier to use than typing into the scanner itself. It allows you to save different configurations in separate files so you can have, for instance, a file for Topeka, and another one for Miami. Again, a really nice feature if you're on the road and have a laptop. Cons: You can't actually control the scanning itself from the computer. Not a big deal but the function might be kinda cool. My biggest complaint is that there is not a standing battery indicator. You only get notification when the batteries get low, but you have no idea when that might be. It's just a minor annoyance... maybe it'll get fixed in a firmware update? Overall, totally useful.