The military airband covers 225-380 MHz. That is over 150 MHz of frequencies to search when looking for new channels.
As Military Airband enthusiasts will know, you really need about 10 scanners to search this range effectively. Well that is until SDRs were invented!
Using a wide bandwidth SDR along with a free plugin in SDR#, it is possible to search the entire UHF Military Airband in just 2 seconds. See the demo below.
Now if you don’t happen to have a high bandwidth SDR like the AirSpy R2, you can still use the plugin with your standard RTL-SDR v3 or NooElec NESDR SMArt dongle. The search time will increase to around 9 seconds (see the videos below), but that still beats any scanner I know of!
In fact my trusty Uniden BCT15X took 1 minute and 10 seconds to search this range as you can see in the video above.
RTL-SDR v3 test
I am a huge fan of the RTL-SDR v3 dongle, to see why, you can read my post on Why I love my RTL-SDR v3. Using this modest SDR, I was able to scan Mil Air in under 10 seconds.
NooElec NESDR SMArt test
The NooElec dongle uses the same chipset as the RTL-SDR v3, so performance was fairly similar. You can see how the test went in the video below.