New Pro 197 questions

[NielsenSTL]

I've been wanting to get a new digital scanner for years now since the STL City Police and Fire went digital. It's probably only a matter of time until STL county goes that way as well. My primary listening focus though is the RR band: ~ 160-162 mhz.

Just got a Pro-197 new out of the box and put all AAR frequencies in the first list and started scanning today. I have to say...I am extremely disappointed with the reception. I have two 20+ year old scanners at home (Radio Shack 2030 and a Uniden BC350A) that receive circles around the new scanner. I did some side by side testing...my old scanner using just the stock telescoping antenna and the Pro-197 using my Scantenna mounted on my roof. It was no contest...the old scanners with just the stock antennas picked up far more traffic on the same RR channels. Normally, I hook up my BC350A to the Scantenna and can pick up RR traffic for miles and miles. And from my location, I can pick up at least something on every station in the weather band on both older scanners with the rooftop antenna. The Pro-197, even hooked up to the rooftop antenna, can only pick up one weather station.

So...what am I missing? Attenuation is not on. How do I tweak this thing to receive better in the VHF band. Otherwise it is of no use to me.

Thanks...Mark

 

[wise871]

You don't have a G on your display do you? Also the 197 has a bad habit of front end overload when hooked to external antenna. A simple FM filter fixed my problems. Go to Radio shack and get a FM trap and adapters so you can add it inline.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=10939219

 

[NielsenSTL]

I do have the G on my display...which I assume means attenuation is off.

I will look into an FM trap. I was just wondering in the ARC500 expert software settings if there were some settings to tweak to improve VHF performance. With a little more digging into the forums, I see this is a common issue with this scanner.

Thanks...Mark

 

[wise871]

G means it's on set to Global Attenuation is ON. Turn it off and see if it improves. VHF suffers from the overload. Again I recommend the FM Trap or true FM filter from PAR.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[fxdscon]

G means it's on set to Global Attenuation is ON.

The "G" by itself does not mean that attenuation is on.

The G means that attenuation will be set to Global when it is enabled.

Attenuation is enabled by the "ATT" key, and an "A" will show on the display after the "G" when it is enabled.

.

 

[wise871]

Stand corrected, had it backwards. Was replying on phone while at store.

 

[NielsenSTL]

Update to the original post: installed a simple FM Trap filter from Radio Shack today and the difference was very noticeable. I turned on the new scanner and seemed to be very close if not the same to getting in the same traffic I was getting before on my old Uniden without the filter. I don't know that the end product will be better than before...but it appears it will be as good as I had before for VHF high...which is really all I was looking for in addition to adding digital capability.

Thanks for the info.

Mark in STL