Another PRO668 firmware bug.

[Boatanchor]

I've noticed that some of my VHF 12.5Khz step frequencies are intermittently being altered to a nearby 5Khz frequency.

For example, program in a conventional frequency of 166.8375Mhz and it works for a few days, then for no apparent reason, the audio starts to sound a little distorted and when I look at the frequency, it has changed to 166.835Mhz (the nearest 5Khz increment).

The Bandplan is set to USA which should force 12.5Khz steps on this band.

Interesting thing is that after this happens, it is impossible to enter the 'Object Editor' mode and enter the correct frequency again. You enter 166.8375 and hit select, the system accepts the frequency, then you go to Save the object configuration and it reverts back to 166.8350Mhz again. Even if you go in and enable 'Flexsteps', the scanner will only accept 5Khz increments.

You can however enter a 5Khz step frequency, so if I enter 166.825Mhz, the scanner is happy with that and will accept it.

The only way you can get the correct 12.5Khz increment frequency back in is to use the PC programming utility.

Bizarre...

These things do appear to be a quirky radio with some rather dodgy (and presumably now unsupported) firmware. No wonder RS was offloading them cheap

I wonder if the WS-1080 and PSR800 do the same thing??

 

[ratboy]

I would be shocked if they didn't, but that they would have some oddball issues this long after the PSR-800 was released, is just nuts. I haven't noticed my 668 doing this, at least so far, all the freqs appear correct, but I wasn't looking for it, so I might have missed it. I heard a lot of weak VHF med and fire stuff tonight, and all the really out there towns were definitely on freq. My conventional freqs haven't been touched since the first day, when I went in and got rid of all the dozens of duplicates of the same VHF freqs with different tones on them. There's a lot of stuff in there and I want the time it takes to scan it all to be as short as is possible. For some reason, Iscan seems to duplicate rail freqs all the time too. Annoying, but Iscan still doesn't annoy me as much as other software does.

 

[DonS]

Any steps to reproduce this? There shouldn't be any possibility of the scanner changing what you have programmed all by itself.

The only time 5kHz steps should be enforced in that frequency range is if:
a) bandplan is set to Canada
AND
b) FlexStep is turned off.