Review: Bearcat BC125AT Scanner is unusable

When I was growing up, a neighbor had a police radio scanner that provided endless hours of amusement and audio voyeurism. (My neighbor was also a ham radio hobbyist and enjoyed pranking neighbors by using his radios to operate their garage doors.) I recently decided that a radio scanner could be interesting for monitoring the heavy traffic on a nearby river. So I bought a Uniden Bearcat BC125AT Handheld Scanner from Amazon. Boy, was that a mistake! It's easily the most frustrating and poorly documented electronic device that I've ever owned. First, the Owners (sic) Manual is littered with acronyms and technical terms that are never properly defined or contextualized. (Aside: Bad tech writers will tell you what an acronym stands for, but not why you should care.) The manual begins with 30 pages of tables and button identifiers before even attempting to describe how to use the product. (Which, ultimately, it fails to do for first-time users.) These tables include such useless…