Where do you find/change these settings at? I don't think I am following.
For the heck of it, I took my Larsen 150/450/800 off and put on a low-band antenna(tuned to 42mHZ). It seems to be decoding ORION better when I'm in Bellevue. With the out of band antenna I'm sure its not hearing as many towers allowing for less confusion with many signals coming into the radio at once.
Tim
Well I don't understand a lot of this new fangled stuff to tell the truth and am probably doing things all wrong but I don't see any traffic off anything but the Douglas County Simulcast site and the Washington County Simulcast site. Those two seem to the only Public Safety sites in the entire system. Part of the things I tried to do in figuring out why I wasn't ever getting crap on this system is to place each site in it's own bank and associate all talk groups with each site. I got no PS traffic off any site except those two. Finally I just inputted those in and seem to do fine.
I don't quite understand to tell the truth why the power company's sites are included in the ORION PS system but I'm sure there is an explanation. They certainly don't seem to carry any PS traffic off them.
As to the settings I found if I did use all the sites and placed them into one system then the multi-site mode would invariably lock onto one of the non PS sites and I would hear NOTHING!. Taking it off into STAT got it checking all sites but still wasn't ideal. Finally until last night I just put in those two sites but still on ROAM which seemed to be better but not nearly as good as now when it's set to OFF.
In the trunking setup for your system when you program the scanner you'll have a choice of ROAM, STAT, or OFF for multi site mode. I just tried the OFF setting when I got into town last night and it's working great. Alternatively if already programmed go into program and select current on the system not the groups and then go down to multi-site and select off. That's on a 600 so if you have Uniden I can't help you or even tell you if they have something comparable.
As to the out of band antenna, well I'll probably get some comments, but quite a few years ago I didn't have money to buy a scanner antenna but did have an extra CB antenna, so hooked that up to see how it worked.
It worked great and ever since I use a five foot Firestick with a BNC adapter on my scanners mounted to the mirror on my truck. No problems whatsoever and I pick up some systems out 50 miles or better.
I'd say make sure all the power company sites are out of your scanner because I don't see that they do anything for you at all except tie up the scanner depending on setting.