Had a few of these over the years. I’ve done a fair bit of testing between the GRE PSR 255 [here] and GRE PSR-295. In terms of signal strength, the Uniden UBC92XLT was slightly behind overall. It could pick up practically everything the 255 and 295 could, only it wasn’t as clear. Functionality is fairly good once learned. However, once learned it becomes apparent that there are some navigation annoyances. One of those being mixing up monitor and close call.
The buttons are on top of each other, and the symbols are under each button. If wanting to monitor in a hurry [called hold on the 92XLT], or swap between channel scan and manual scan, It’s so easy to press the wrong button and end up activating CloseCall. Channels are easy to program, and it is quite a nice scanner to use overall. The channel bank system is great. Banks can be turned on or off using the numbers on the keypad.
The 92XLT only requires 2 AA batteries, and they do last well unless the user is constantly turning on the nice bright amber backlight. Even then they do last quite well. The only real negative for me is the speaker. It doesn’t sound very clear a lot of the time. It’s like Uniden tried to save money by putting in a really cheap internal speaker. Sounds deep and muffled. Still, everything can be heard, you just have to listen a bit more intently.
I have to be honest. I would choose a Quansheng UV K5 8 With Egzumer installed [review here] over the Uniden UBC92XLT. It’s less annoying to use, and yes, the Quanheng K5 8’s speaker isn’t the best. But it is the complete opposite of the speaker in the UBC92XLT. It’s tinny and clear, while the Uniden’s audio is deep and a bit too muffled and sometimes the audio is a bit too hard to make out for my liking.
They both have 200 channels, but the Quansheng with modified firmware has a wider frequency range. The Uniden has many gaps. The Quansheng is generally cheaper also. And it has light up keypad buttons, the Uniden does not. And that comes in real handy in low light environments.
Uniden UBC92XLT Troubleshooting
I’m sure there’s lot of things to troubleshoot with this model, but the only problem that I ever had with one of mine was when I first bought it. The person I bought it from sold it to me extremely cheap because he thought it was broken. The issue: Once turned on all that could be heard was a weird tone from the speaker, like a broken / dying kids toy. With faint characters showing up on the screen. Yep, it seemed like it was faulty alright.
The little switch inside the battery compartment can be set to either Alkaline or Ni-MH
Turns out it was due to the batteries. There is a little switch inside the battery compartment. If you can’t see it when taking a look its most probably behind a little sticker. This switch needs to be changed between using Alkaline batteries and rechargeable batteries. The person I bought the scanner from basically had the switch set for the wrong battery type. Once I changed it to the correct order, the scanner was fixed and worked with no issues at all.