Hi powermaccie,
I personally use a Radio shack (or Realistic) Pro-60.
It depends what you are after, i.e. if you want to be able to scan through lots of frequencies or if you prefer to scan a smaller group of frequencies so that you definitely catch the transmissions that you want.
For instance, the Pro 60 has 200 channels that you can type in and save in "banks". You then can either scan through all 200 ( or more if you have a scanner with more channel memories), and it will stop scanning when it hears something being transmitted on one of these channels. Or you can choose to put the frequencies for certain set things in seperate banks. i.e. if you know certain aircraft use a number of set frequencies often, then if you are wanting to hear them, it is best to scan only that bank or banks with their frequencies in them. If you only want to listen to the tower and pilots arriving/departing, then you probably don't need many channels to store the frequencies in. However, once you listen a bit and start hearing other frequencies used i.e. radar, air-air comms etc., you might wish that you had more channels in the scanner. The first scanner I bought only had 10 channels in it. You could still search throught entire bands but you could then only store 10 of your favourite frequencies
I loved it when I later got my other scanner with more channels able to be stored.
The speed of the scan is another factor. I personally am happy with the speed of the pro 60 when scanning certain banks, but sometimes I wish it was a bit faster when scanning all 200 channels. It goes at 25 channels per second. Things like the newer Uniden Bearcat BCD396XT go at 100 channels a second and also allow for some digital comms.
If you get a faster scanner, then you can scan more banks quickly, but they would cost more than buying an older one off ebay etc. and the older ones may do exactly what you are wanting.
All modern scanners, apart from the channels that can be stored in them, can (at least as far as I know they "all" can) "search" entire bands still and you can tell it to search between two spots i.e. 225.000mhz to 267.000 mhz (or whatever freq. area you choose that the radio allows) and it will go round and round through that area, checking for signals even without any channels being previously stored.
The main thing is to flook for scanners that pick up the frequency area between about 225 mhz -380 mhz.
You may have seen this already but here is a page that might be of some help to you:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.ph ... _Equipment" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
That page has lists of some (not all) scanners that can be used for military listening.
Another page there:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.ph ... Monitoring" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The other thing to look out for is if you might need the "low vhf" area too. The military use around 30mhz - 88?mhz sometimes and sometimes Air Forces use some down in that band too. Usually though its the 220 to 380 or vhf airband freq area of 118-136mhz although often just above this i.e 130s mhz, 140s mhz.
The following page has a list down the left side under the title "Ham & swl", of radio brands. If you click on them and look through the portable scanners, you can get an idea of the differences between them. Some of the brands are under "scanner/ receivers" or handies/portables etc. Some of these however are transmitters though, so they are not really what you would be after ( I don't know if any/many of the transmitting portables have a full military uhf band receiver in them....probably not many,... if any, so its best to just look at the ones that only receive):
http://www.rigpix.com/index.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
If you want to follow an aircraft from leaving it's base and flying to another distant country, then you could also use an HF radio with whats called SSB. Some radios have the low vhf, vhf airband, uhf military band and also the HF (shortwave ) bands, however I am not sure if there is a portable that can do all of this with SSB( instead of am/fm modes). The ones that do it seem to only allow am/fm in the HF bands.
Anyway, I hope this helps you out a bit with what you wanted to know.
db
, pherhaps he would be so kind to share some info