NOTES ON THE UNIDEN BC 355N SCANNER

NOTES ON THE UNIDEN BC 355N SCANNER

The BC355N is an inexpensive analog only scanner with an inscrutable manual that leaves out instructions most needed by experienced users. It seems to be geared to the consumer market and comes with a great many pre-programmed police and fire channels on every band, something not desired by the scanner veteran. The built-in speaker provides very tinny, flimsy audio and an external speaker is suggested.

After being asked by a couple of people to help them program their 355, I created this page. You will find that the 355 manual doesn't explain how to simply program a set of channels in an empty bank (there is only one empty bank, called "Private.")

Thus...

There is only one bank of channels where you can enter all your own choices and not have anything else pre-inserted by the factory. This is the “Private” bank. The Private bank has 100 channels available. Use that and only that for regular scanning. The other banks are only useful for finding unknown channels, and are for factory pre-inserted channels and are not really useful in normal use. The other banks might be useful if you are traveling and don't know what channels are in use in a particular area.

HOW TO PROGRAM CHANNELS IN THE "PRIVATE" BANK

(The manual omits this (!) and the YouTube video leaves an important step out.)

1) Press [ SEARCH]

2) Press [BAND] and keep pressing [BAND] again until the correct band shows in the display for the frequency you want. For example, if you want to program 155.685, the Band has to be 148-174. When you are on the correct band, press [HOLD]

3) Use the up-down arrow buttons to scroll up or down until you find the frequency you want.

4) Now press [PROGRAM] and then press [PRIVATE]

5) The display will now show the start channel of the PRIVATE channel bank, “0”, so use the up arrow key to move to the channel number you want. You will see the tiny channel number in the upper left of the display, the frequency shown on the display will flash back and forth between what is on that channel now and what you want it to be. If it has never been programmed, it will be all zeroes. When you are on the correct channel (use arrow keys up or back down to get there), press [PROGRAM] again.

6) Do this for each channel. When you are finished, the PRIVATE bank will have only the channels you want and no others.

7) To then start scanning, press [PRIVATE].

TO REVIEW WHAT YOU PROGRAMMED IN THE "PRIVATE" BANK:

Press [PRIVATE] then [HOLD] and use the little arrow keys to scroll through the channels, up and down (Channel 0 is blank.) You can undo permanent lockouts when in this mode. When finished, press [PRIVATE} again and scanning will resume.

Remember:

* When you are scanning, only the flashing “PRIVATE” lettering should show on the display. If “Police” “Fire”or “Emerg” show, or anything else, press those lettered buttons until they go away, so that only PRIVATE shows when scanning. Otherwise you will get garbage from the pre-inserted channels because the scanner is scanning more than one bank at a time. You only want to scan the PRIVATE bank.

* The rest of the instructions are in the manual and appear to be correct, such as the "Close Call" feature which drastically reduces the sensitivity of the scanner so that you will only hear the strongest nearby signals. I don't really see the point of this feature. It's too bad there isn't a scan delay adjustment feature or the option to have no delay on some channels (useful on CHP channels,) and a display contrast adjustment would have been helpful along with a display brightness control.

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