Do You Really Need a New Antenna?

What You Need To Know

• Stock antennas included with your scanner can cover large frequencies.
• Antennas with wide coverage will sacrifice performance.
• Antennas with too narrow coverage can also impair your reception.
• You don’t want to have an 800 MHz antenna on your scanner when you’re trying to also listen to VHF.
• However, if you have an 800MHz antenna and need to monitor 800MHz, then you may find a big improvement in reception.
• When we look at aftermarket antennas, we need to check what type of connector do we have on top of our scanner.
• Today’s scanners use BNC or some style of SMA. You need an antenna to match or buy adapters to make your new antenna match your scanner’s antenna jack.
• After market antennas can have gain, which can certainly help us pull in weaker signals.
• There may be times where you want to cause an intentional degradation of reception
• If you have issues with P25 simulcast, maybe you want to knock out distant transmitters and detuning your antenna might actually help you receive better.
• If you are receiving well enough using the stock antenna, will swapping the antenna out actually improve anything? You can’t receive 120% of a signal.

Are you looking for your first scanner radio?

Download our new e-guide, “5 Thinks You Need to Know Before Buying Your First Scanner”.   This free PDF is about 30 pages long and has 5 things you should look for, plus a few extra bonus items to make sure you make an educated purchase.

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