why only a few channels

Hi all,

so I'm new to the scanner world. I bought the uniden bcd396xt on sale. It was normally $496 and radio shack was closing one of its stores and it was %50 off, not a bad deal. Any way, bought the one year membership for this site, downloaded what I believed to be UHP(Utah highway patrol) channels and other local PD channels and programmed them into the scanner. It doesn't seem like there are very many. When the scanner is on, there just doesn't seem to be very much traffic. Are there channels that are out there that we cant or are not allowed to program into our scanners that belong to local law enforcement etc? What are the benefits of having a scanner as opposed to not having one? Is this considered to be a new/ higher end portable scanner? Wwill this model really do military channels and other agencies or have most of them moved onto new technology that the scanners cant track?



Any insight that anyone can give me on any of these questions, would be greatly appreciated!

Rich

why only a few channels