I have been looking for a better radio s ... / 2009-04-26

I have been looking for a better radio scanner recently. For the amount of use it will get and what I want a second hand one is probably best. I also noticed the new ones on sale at the moment in the Netherlands are quite limited.
There are the simple ones with 50-100 channels which don't have the militairy air communications band that I want, and no 'tuning' option (tuning up and down the dial when looking for signals in a certain area).
Those are sometimes sold as 'church radio' in the Netherlands because somewhere in the years the rescue services moved to encrypted speech (C2000), frequencies 148.0125 to 149.0875 MHz and 153.0125 to 153.6875 MHz were opened especially for 'church radio': transmitting a church service (and nothing else). Most scanners will support this range. I really don't think the 'target audience' of church radio, people who want to hear a church service but are unable to go to church, usually elderly or sick people will be able to deal with all the little knobs and dials on the average radio scanner. I looked at the designs for church radio via Internet 'receivers' and those have a volume control and an on-off switch. The very advanced model has a 'channel' selector for choosing a church or gospel music.
The higher-end radio scanners sold new are really high-end with alphanumeric channel descriptions and trunk-tracking options. A bit too much for what I want, and too expensive.
So I'm browsing the secondhand scanner ads on a few websites. And everytime I see an offer that looks nice I look up the details of the offered scanner on the scanner reviews on the Strong Signals site which is a very good resource for finding out the options of scanners and comparing them.
I hope to find one for a reasonable price. In browsing the ads I learned about brands I haven't heard of before. There is Commtel which is actually from Uniden and GRE, making some Commtel models near copies of Uniden Bearcat models. There is also Realistic which seems to be the other name for Radio Shack scanners. Icom also makes receiver / scanners but those are out of my price range.