This was exactly the same with mine, and I think this means that something on the motherboard inside has failed and will need replacing. So if you haven't got experience with radio electronics / soldering / fault finding etc I would say don't be tempted to buy one of these radios that has this fault just because it is being sold cheap. If you need to send it somewhere for repair it may end up costing you a fair bit of money to get fixed. You may as well buy a fully working Realistic Pro-26 for more money to begin with.
Many old scanners suffer from common problems over time. Things fail. It reminds me a bit of the AOR AR8000. It's an old but still quite capable receiver that can be prone to keypad issues, where the keypad starts to fail and buttons stop working. The good thing about this problem is that it is repairable some of the time, and it's quite easy to do it yourself. All that's needed is a membrane pad repair kit. But these can sometimes be quite expensive, so look around as some can be found cheap if searching for something similar. Like "remote membrane control repair kit" or "Electronics Cleaning Repair Kits" etc.
I suppose it should be expected for thing to fail on old scanners. I mean, the two mentioned here are over 3 decades old. And as great as they are, things do break after many years of use. I wonder if any of the modern radio equipment would last as long. I'd also be interesting in hearing what others have to say about their scanners in terms of reliability. What's the most reliable scanner you have ever owned? And is it still in use today.
