ARC330 & Web Service - TG Alpha Tags?

[eorange]

When I query the radioreference web service with the following:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/xml1.1/?sid=567

I get back the Geauga County, OH trunked system. A small exerpt:

<tg dec="176" subfleet="" desc="County 1 (Smaller Police Depts)" disp="1G" group="Law Enforcement" mode="" tgid="122299"/>
<tg dec="208" subfleet="" desc="GCSO Special Ops/Warrants?" disp="" group="Law Enforcement" mode="" tgid="122324"/>

ARC330 does the following: because TG 176 has a non-null disp tag, the TG alpha tag is displayed as "1G". But TG 208 alpha tag is the more desirable "GCSO Special Ops/Warrants", because the disp tag is null.

ARC330's logic is it uses the "disp" tag, if there is one, instead of the description. According to the Web Service Definitions:

desc A description of the frequency usage
disp Display text / zone field

So my question: what is the true purpose of the disp tag? It seems to mostly contain NULLs or this hex number, as opposed to human-readable text.

Just looking for some insight...is the data stored incorrectly, or is ARC330 interpreting the tags incorrectly?

Thanks.

[loumaag]

The "disp" field is not a Hex value as you thought. It is what is actually displayed on a real radio (if known). So if you were a real radio subscriber on that system and tuned to that TG, you would see "1G" on your display. The "desc" field is what the administrator who entered the TG was given as a description of the what the TG was. Obviously it is not what a real subscriber sees on his display but rather what we (as scanner hobbyists) feel is a descriptive notation of what type of activity is on that TG.

Now, as to the ARC330 automatically using one or the other, that is a topic you need to get with Butel on. I feel that (and understand I don't have ARC330) all programming software that accesses the RR Web Service should allow you to choose to use either the Descriptive field or the Display field; all we do is provide the data, how it is used is up to the individual software developers.

[Butelsoftware]

We first check the display field since they are a short description that matches the limited number of characters used on the scanners display, if it is empty we use the first 16 characters of the description.

Gommert
www.butelsoftware.com

[eorange]

Thanks to both of you for confirming what I thought. ARC330 brings down the info in both the disp and desc tags, so it's easy to copy the desc info and paste into disp if needed.