Scanning; What You Cannot Pickup; The Scan Banks - AOR AR1000 Manual

Scanning

Scanning
Although the AR1000 is a wide range receiver, it is primarily designed as a
scanner. A scanner lets you plug in a group of frequencies and then it scans these
frequencies for activity. If it finds an active channel, it stops, allowing you to
monitor the activity. Once the channel becomes inactive, the AR1000 continues
scanning. With the AR1000, you can scan up to 1,000 channels at one time, but
this would be impractical since it would take quite a long time to scan all 1,000
channels. You want to balance the number of channels scanned with the speed of
the scanner. The AR1000 scans at approximately 20 channels per second. Given
this scanning speed, you may want to limit the number of channels you scan at
any one time. For good success monitoring channels, you usually don't want to
have more than two or three seconds between checking any given channel. This
means that you may want to limit the number of channels you scan at any one
time to between 40 and 60. This limit is rather arbitrary since it depends on the
level of activity of the scanned channels, how often you need to check each
channel, and other individual factors. Use it as a guide.
If you're new to scanning, you may wonder how to determine which frequencies
to check. There are many guides of frequencies available for all kinds of activities.
The most popular guides cover things like police, fire, emergency medical,
marine, air, and military frequencies. The Appendix lists some frequency sources
that you may find useful. The AR1000 is also capable of picking up shortwave
transmissions from all over the world, when used with an appropriate antenna.
Because the AR1000XC (and modified AR1000s) have continuous coverage of .5
MHz to 1300 MHz, there is very little that is not available to you with your
scanner and a good antenna.

What you cannot pickup

The things you won't be able to pick up with the AR1000 are few. You will not
be able to easily decode Single Side Band (SSB) transmissions, because there is no
beat frequency oscillator (BFO) included with the AR1000. For the same reason,
it will be difficult to pick up Continuous Wave (CW or Morse code) transmis-
sions. In addition, you will not be able to decode any digital or otherwise en-
crypted transmissions. Finally, since the AR1000 is a voice monitor, you won't
be able to receive or decode RTTY, FAX, or satellite data transmissions. These
limitations are trivial considering the vast range of transmissions you can receive.

The scan banks

The AR1000 comes with ten scan banks that hold 100 channels each. You can
selectively turn on or off any or all of these ten scan banks. This means that, at
the bank level, the smallest unit of selection is a group of 100 channels. This is a
rather cumbersome chunk to deal with. If you want to put your local police
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