Program your BC95XLT scanner on Mac, PC, or Linux
Wanna program your BC95XLT “NASCAR” scanner on your Mac or Linux machine? This Free and Open Source scanner software makes it easy. You’ll need a scanner cable that plugs into your machine, or into a compatible adapter.
The week or so I spend getting to and living at the 12 Hours of Sebring got off to a slow start this year. I left getting scanner banks into my trusty BC95XLT scanner ’til the last minute, without realizing that last year’s change to an Apple Silicon Mac and the Parallels VM environment for Windows would leave me high and dry for channel programming software.
Nothing worked anymore.
I decided I’d get it working at the track, but no such luck. Eventually, I decided there was nothing for it but to write my own software to program the scanner. I sat up late into the night in the camper a couple nights banging it out, with a little help from Claude.ai for the boring boilerplate stuff. I didn’t start out to write a GUI app, but I sort of backed into it, and there we are.
In the end, while I took a while to polish it a little, the effort to write the thing was so small, I found myself cursing Uniden for never creating macOS software for the scanner – it really was pretty cake, and they could’ve lifted a finger to do so. Thanks for nothing, Uniden.
To manage your scanner banks, you’ll need to use a spreadsheet program, and export your sheet to a .csv (Comma-Separated Value) file. This approach let me wrap things up without the complicated GUI required to manage all 200 banks in the program. Frankly, I prefer a best-of-breed spreadsheet for managing this information: it works with the expected OS conventions and shortcuts, in a way that proprietary scanner software that fakes a spreadsheet UI never seems to.
A couple notes on usage:
On macOS: The software is un-signed. This means I’m an “unidentified developer” and macOS will complain. You’ll need to right-click (or CTRL-click) the software to bring up the context menu with “Open” as an option. This will bring up a dialog that will let you open the software anyway. You’ll only have to do this the first time you launch it.
On Linux: Generally, to get access to the serial ports, you’ll need to be a member of the dialout group. To make this happen, you’ll need superuser permissions (generally using sudo). Open a terminal and type:
sudo adduser {your username} dialout
(don’t type the curly braces). Once you’re added to the dialout group, you shouldn’t have to do this again.
On all platforms: If you can’t get the executable software to run, the primary workaround is to install Python 3.12 or later, install the pyserial module, and run the software with python from the command line.
Getting BC95XLTprog
You can find the program on GitHub. Look for the “Releases” link near the right-hand side of the page.