Funny thing about some of these new scanners, they either work well for you or they do not. There seems to be no middle ground. Many people swear behind the WS1080, other's like me hated it. I had the PSR-800 for about a year and it was a battle to say the least. I am revisiting this due to the expectation of the mobile equivalent (WS1095) which will hopefully be released next year.
The 1080 has a VERY sensitive receiver, which either works for or against you. A lot has to do with your environment (wifi, cell phones, laptops etc), your antenna and what you are trying to monitor. Part of my issue may have been my antenna selection. I had tried several different ones, but settled on the Seeker800, which in hindsight may have been too much gain on 800 & 700. Another common issue is that VHF tended to get overloaded very easily, which then required you to run those channels with the Attenuation on, and that often made the signal weak and scratchy.
Like I said, at home it was a constant battle. I did take several trips with it over the year and had varied results.
The first trip was to Southern California soon after I bought it. LAPD came in pretty good, along with most of the other systems I programmed in. Over all it was a pretty good trip.
2nd Trip was just north of Chicago. Trying to monitor the STARCOM21 turned out to be a disaster, which a lot of interference (from the hotel I imagine). I had to lock out several of the trunk channels and wound up hearing very little. I was just outside the Chicago range, but was able to pick up some of their UHF channels.
The 3rd trip was to Brownsville Texas. I had monitored the city trunk system several times in the past with Uniden Scanners and expected the same type of results. I did get more interference than the Unidens, but it wasn't as bad as it was in Chicago, I still had wished I had my Uniden with me through.
On to the sofware. A big positive is that you are limited only by the size of your sdcard (more on sdcard's later). Uniden HP series limits you to 1 meg per scan list, and if you have a lot of radio ID's, that space goes quickly. A big negative is that the software updates your list in real time, so if you accidentally a bunch of things, they are gone forever, unless you backed it up before you started. I had done this many times when I thought I was deleting all the radio id's and instead deleted all the talkgroups. If Whistler has learned anything, please change that in the next generation of radios.
Although the 1080 has a USB interface similar to the Uniden, write speed was painfully slow, and often wound up corrupting the sdcard. I found that you had to remove the sdcard from the scanner and plug it directly into the computer to program it, otherwise it took 15 minutes or so to program. This is another area which really needs improvement.
Sadly, I never really tested the scanner inside the car with the outside antenna. I wish I had because now that the mobile version may be upon us, I would have liked to see how it would perform on the road.
Finally, one of the biggest drawbacks, is there is no programming this without a computer. If you are like me and use your own scan lists, if you leave for a trip and mess something up, your only recourse is to try and import it from the database. Sometimes that works, other not so much. I found that the alpha tagging is often very generic and you may wind up with something that just shows up as "Police 1", but you have no idea which police it is.
On the next installment I plan on comparing the future WS1095 mobile to the Uniden BCD536HP & Home Patrol 2.
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