[offsite]

One thing you can't do with this dual receiver unit (at least for right now) is use one side for monitoring a control channel and the other side for voice following. There currently is no trunking software app that will support this mode of operation.

Another thing you can't do is trunk track a P25 system using an external receiver for the CC and the 2500 for voice following. The 2500 defaults to analog mode, and no current trunking app I have found will toggle it to digital mode.

The 2500 employs an optional board for decoding P25 signals. It provides the best quality audio from pure P25 systems of all consumer units I have tried (2500, 396T, 996T, PSR-500). However it will not decode mixed system digital signals here in the San Diego area (470F and 2B2E). The analog channels come thru fine.

If you plan to use this unit with a spectrum analyzer (such as the wonderful SDR-14) you will have to be really good with tacking wires to components in a surface mount environment, or be willing to send your 2500 off to someone who is, because there is no stock access to the 10.7 MHz 2nd IF signal otherwise. Also, the 1st IF filter provides a limited bandwidth signal to the 2nd IF section, so you will not find a very wide chunk of spectrum to view compared with that from, say, the venerable old Icom R8500.

And finally, you may also need to move the pickoff point for the discriminator output(s). The factory point is downstream of some filtering that provides a signal at the output jacks on the rear panel that does not play nicely with some software slicer/analyzer apps.

On the positive side, there are well documented mods for both the 2nd IF and discriminator signal issues. So, both can be fixed if they are important to your scanning protocol.

Btw, my immediate plan is to do a comparative look at the 2500 vs. my R8500s, and my soon to arrive AR5000+3, with an eye to some spring pruning. So, there may be one of these on the boards here in the next few months or so, if you are still looking then.