Greetings,
As you can see by the topic line, I'm brand new to this area of interest and really don't have a clue how to get started. I'm a very non technical sort of person (plug it in and let 'er rip) is about my level of technical expertise. However, I do have a Uniden ubc72xlt hooked up to a Discone antenna (normally used for listening to aircraft, etc) and am wondering if this would be satisfactory to get started? That's obviously the first question with more questions to come if the answer is yes. If the answer is no, then I guess that ends my involvement and I go back to listening to aircraft, police, etc

Ta muchly for your reply. The 72xlt already has a discriminator tap in the back of it. I bought it from someone on the NZScanners forum who had already modified it... although I didn't have a clue what the discriminator tap was for!

Does it make a difference at all as to whether either stereo or mono cable is used to hook the receiver to the pc?

Ta muchly for that. Well, I guess my next step is to see if I can actually hear anything on the frequencies.

Ok, I'm getting no signal at all showing up on shipplotter. That, along with the fact that I'm also having difficulty decoding vhf acars with the scanner, tends to make me think I need a mono cable rather than a stereo one. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong?

It would appear that the 72xlt doesn't handle such signals very well, at least judging by the signal output in shipplotter. Instead of nice smooth curves, as outlined in the shipplotter manual, I get sharp jagged spikes. I was afraid of this kind of result since the 72xlt is really only a very low-end scanner.

Looks like I was wrong in thinking the 72xlt can't handle it. Since I wrote that I have had success in picking up several ships on the few occasions when I've switched to those frequencies. It does look like it will take me quite a long time to get to grips with the actual shipplotter prgm though. Reading through the pdf manual left me kinda shell-shocked. Lot of terms I've never heard of let alone know what they mean.

It appears that the online map setup isn't working. I carefully followed all instructions for setting up, got a map ID 60, set up Shipplotter to upload, came back to shipplotter.com to see the map and was told that I didn't have a map set up. Also none of the links on that page - the one that told me I didn't have a map set up - work.

I'm sorry I have been really busy on another project.  The site is very alive.  I am looking into redo part of the setup on the site.

If you are using the shipplotter software, the map number, should be the number in the about page between the curly braces i.e. {20224} or {2093b}.  If you are using our software, then you can enter what ever you like, just make sure it matches.  And you have to enter it in the website first, then in your software, since the software verifies the number.

Other than that, make sure you have sharing enabled every time you start the software.  It's the little blue icon, with arrows pointing in opposites.  I can't tell you how many times I forget that one.  So I'm not trying to sound mean.  I just forget it a lot myself.

Let me know if that helps.  If not, take a snapshot of you screen and post it here, and one of your settings.  I could look into the database then and verify you have everything setup correctly.

Sorry for the delay on replying.

Aric