The Uniden-Bearcat BCD996XT Digital Scanner Review

The Uniden-Bearcat BCD996XT Digital Scanner
Features, Operation and Competition
A Scanner Master Ultimate Review

Introduction
The Uniden Bearcat BCD996XT is the follow-up to Uniden's premier mobile scanner, the BCD996T, which has been discontinued. The 'XT has more memories (up to 25,000 channels!) and many new features while retaining the 996D's DIN form factor and price. The BCD996XT
directly competes with the GRE PSR600 and Radio Shack Pro197.

The BCD996XT adds such new features as allowing up to 500 talkgroups per trunked system (compared to 200 for the 996D), NAC decoding, Fire Toneout Search and GPS Support. Some of these features have never been available on any scanner before. In addition to all this the latest firmware version even allows individual Unit ID's for identifying specific radios in trunked systems.
The BCD996XT uses Uniden's Dynamic Memory Architecture (DMA) instead of fixed Banks and Channels. This method of programming was introduced a few years back with the BC246T and is also used on such scanners as the BCD396T and BCD996T. While it has a similar effect as the GRE "Memory Object" system, the Uniden method is somewhat easier to fathom and program for many people. DMA allows you to program as many Channels, Systems and Groups as you can until the memory runs out instead of locking you into a fixed amount of banks and
channels.