My Coach came with a Uniden Bearcat BC350A scanner, as I assume many of the older coaches came with.
I never bothered with it or took the time to figure it out. I did download the manual tonight but don't want to waste my time learning about it only to find out its a useless dinosaur.
I'm in the process of removing some of the old equipment now and wondered if the scanner was still relevant in today's modern tech.
Toss it or keep it?
Scanners didn't come from the factory CB's did. All my old scanners aare pretty much useless as everything went digital.
Digital and Scrambled
The CB is the other dash accessory I need to determine if its worth keeping.
If you talk to truckers keep it if you don,t use it keep it,someday you may need it,don,t understand
The worth question,it,s not costing you anything.
I like having the CB to check/listen in when stuck in traffic to learn what is going on.
It's also fun to use on channel 4 when caravanning with other FT's.
The CB still has some value listening to over the road truck drivers talk about road conditions. We use amateur radio on 40M to listen to Westcars, Midcars or Eastcars 7.255 MHz.
When I had my 1997 U295 about 5 or 6 years ago I was getting ready to go on a trip with 2 other coaches. We were going to use our CB's to communicated with each other. I had not used it in years. When I went to turn it on after a few seconds, smoke started coming from the dash. I was the CB control unit smoking. I quickly turned it back off. Opened up the dash and cut the wire going to the unit. For a while my wife and I thought we were not going to be even able to start the trip.
My CB works fine and I have wondered if I saw another Foretravel it would be fun to talk to the
other driver if we had a channel we agreed to use when sighting.
As for the scanner, doubt it was OEM. The hand held cobra CB was OEM. I replaced my non working original CB with a new Cobra of the same model. I use it occasionally to check with truckers on road and traffic conditions. It may come in handy if you are in a remote area with no cell signal.
I have a scanner in my truck that I've had for 25 years, still works although not as many agencies still use the analog signal but some still do. I still hear some communications on mine from our local sheriff office. I keep my hand held scanner in the coach when we travel. It also still picks up all the 7 weather band broadcasts of the NWS.
I would keep both if I were you, unless they are taking up needed space, why not keep them?
Plus 2 on channel 4