Freescan talking to BCD996P2, except....

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hokisazchka

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After much careful research, I took the plunge and invested in a Uniden BCD996P2. Rather impressive bit of hardware, but holy mother of God whoever wrote the manual was a complete sadist. Gave up on manual programming and got set up with Freescan. Got connected via USB (which is hours of hell, but that's another whole story), but finally all checks out good, all going fine, and then....

Programming fails at the same exact point every single time.

WTF?

Uploading all but the offending Systems I get everything else in the scanner except the same three systems all fail at the same groups, loading the same channels each time. An interoperability system fails at the LawEnf(UHF) group to program LE-14, a med interoperability system fails to load MED 2, and a Texas DPS system fails to load DPS Harlingen.

Reloading just the DPS system by itself, works. Trying the same thing with the other two systems doesn't. Delete the offending channels entirely and the systems load fine...except for the interoperability system, which freezes up on an entirely different channel now.

So why does the scanner not like just those certain channels? Memory is only 6% full, Freescan isn't having any other issues talking to the scanner, either reading OR writing, it just up and fails on just those certain channels.

What gives? Nothing about the frequencies, settings or groups has anything in common between them.
 

Voyager

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Hoe many channels do you have in that System? (use the statistics tools in FreeScan to tell you)
 

mciupa

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Report that bug to the software author. I'm sure he would like to know if something is not working properly.
 
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rbm

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That problem will occur if there is a 'comma' within the 'Display' field for any frequency or talk group.

I've seen that happen quite a few times times when I've helped others with the same problem.

Rich
 

hokisazchka

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That problem will occur if there is a 'comma' within the 'Display' field for any frequency or talk group.

I've seen that happen quite a few times times when I've helped others with the same problem.

Rich

No commas, but I think dashes might be the problem now that you mention that. I'll have to go back and check. Thanks!

Make sure you are not over the maximum limits of 20 groups / 500 talk group per system.

Yeah, I already ran into that, and Freescan caught it automatically. I had to break my DPS groups into two systems because there were too many.

Freescan go to TOOLS, Automatic channel optimizer, then Invalid channels - click View

Will definitely have to try that one.

Part of the problem is this: I do not own a Windows computer. I have one that I have easy access to at work that I loaded Freescan onto and can edit and play with the programming, but I can't load the USB drivers onto it due to IT restrictions in order to actually interface with the scanner. A friend of mine loaded the USB drivers, so when I think I've got everything where I want it I put it on a thumb drive and take the scanner to connect to his computer and upload everything...but between his schedule and mine that only happens once a week.

I don't suppose anyone knows of a good OSX solution out there? {crickets}

Thanks for the help! I appreciate all the suggestions.
 

hokisazchka

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This should help get you started: http://www.scannermaster.com/Articles.asp?ID=385

The biggest issue I had was fiddling with the baud rates in both the hardware device manager (it's in advanced settings) and the scanner setup menus until they finally talked to each other without hiccups. All of this was using the test function in Freescan until it detected the scanner, then attempting to read from/write to the scanner. Apparently Uniden thinks it's still 1992, because none of this is anything any customer should have to do, and they don't even bother giving you any instructions whatsoever in how to do anything on the computer side of things, you're just supposed to know how to already. I had a hell of a time finding the driver, and you have to have it for the computer to even know the scanner exists. WTF, Uniden, you couldn't stick all this in the goddamn box? So yeah, I'm completely over Uniden and will never buy another one of their products again. All I can say is good freakin' luck...you're going to need it!
 
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