TRX 1 and 2 strange and persistent issues

Hello folks. I am not a technical person so I can only state what I am observing from a limited knowledge base. I have had the TRX-1 for 2 months now, and the TRX-2 for about a month now. I have owned two 1's and 1 TRX-2. Strange reception and failure to latch issues come and go, no matter which antennas, roof of home, unit mounted, portable antennas of many makes and kinds, and with the use of preamps and filters, etc. What's the most strange issue of all is that when I turn on any of my units, they fail to latch onto many UHF/VHF/P25/DMR signals that are as close as five miles away, or as far as 35 miles away. The only way to resolve this issue, even though temporarily, is to go to EZscan, and to the scanner/SD Card tab, and then select, copy config to scanner/SD Card and follow the process through. Somehow, that "wakes up" my scanners and the duration of leaving the scanners on, it latches on to many more of the channels then before. As soon as I restart the scanners, the issues of failing to recognize MANY of the systems start all over again. Does anyone else have this issue or am I looney? I spend a lot of time with these scanners and the issues are persistent, even when they are brand new and out of the box to present day.

Have you check for firmware updates on these?

All scanners are up to date in ALL and were initially set up by Whistler's customer service via remote access to my computer/scanners.

Ever since the 4.1 CPU firmware of the TRX-1 I have been having major
dropouts on digital DMR.Before this it was at least decoding DMR,now I cant hear Phase 2 or DMR.
I went from loving this scanner to wanting to drive over it.

Scottish,you may have found something there,I would send it to whistler tech support .
I think its support@whistlergroup.com

I have had the same problem also,I notice when I unplug my unit from adapter it turns off radio and when I plug back in it corrupts my card so then I have to reformat it,talked to Whistler and they told me to do a default on EZ Scan,still can't beat my 800 for reception,trunked system 50 miles away with base attenna 5 bars TRX-1,2 bars?

I have spent hundreds of dollars and even more in hours of time trying new coax, cable, antennas, repositioning, driving around, etc. This has been going on with all three Whistler TRX-1/2 scanners since they were released to present. Please don't get me wrong, I am not belly aching here. Just putting it out there. I believe that Whistler has the best US made scanners and I am excited about what's coming up.

Hate to suggest this, but do you know anyone that has a Uniden 436/536 that you can compare the performance against?

Sometimes having a "Known Good" receiver to compare performance against will help sort out programming and/or firmware bugs.

You may even want to purchase a cheap SDR dongle and then you can use this to monitor and compare against. This may be the cheapest sanity check to consider.

Sadly the TRX-2 seems to be not as RF sensitive as other scanners, at least not on 400Mhz band.
The Uniden BCD536 decodes DMR even with a noisy signal, sometimes better than a proper DMR radio.
The TRX-2 needs a noise free signal to be able to decode. All radios/scanners connected to same antenna and no problem with interfeering transmitters or overload issues, just weak signal monitoring.

/Ubbe

JamesO said:

...You may even want to purchase a cheap SDR dongle and then you can use this to monitor and compare against. This may be the cheapest sanity check to consider.

Click to expand...

Since the OP stated he was not a technical person, the SDR suggestion may not be his cup of tea. SDR is not a plug and play medium, yet.

radio3353 said:

Since the OP stated he was not a technical person, the SDR suggestion may not be his cup of tea. SDR is not a plug and play medium, yet.

Click to expand...

Correct, but for $30 or so for the SDR dongle, then it may be worth trying to get one up and going on a computer. I mean OP seems to do well with coax, filters and pre-amps so he could probably deal with an SDR option.

Thanks for the ideas and such! I don't know that much, but I am learning. Hopefully, Whistler will solve these issues soon! I believe that Whistler scanners have the most potential in any scanner I have owned so far. I can only guess that the US and Philippines (were their radios are made), will soon be parting ways with the political atmosphere as it is. Thanks and blessings!

Mine is better after reverting back to 3.9 firmware,at least now the DMR decodes.....
Maybe one day I will be able to hear Phase 2 properly on the big 700mhz NJ system.

How do you revert back to 3.9?

Looking back at the release notes, Whistler did a change of some digital values: “Fixed DSP DAC/ADC gain offsets”. Its possible that your (k2ool) ADC Setting in 3.9 was working for you. Maybe try and play with the ADC settings if you update back to firmware 4.1 will get your DMR working again.

The DSP fix where probably only to fix the issue that changes you did to DSP levels wheren't transfered properly between EZScan and TRX and values where reset and out of range.

The DMR audio are still too low compared with analog even at highest +2 setting in DAC and I don't notice any changes in DMR decode success rate with ADC settings from -2 to +2. Perhaps the ADC settings doesn't apply to the new DMR protocol.

/Ubbe

Ubbe said:

Sadly the TRX-2 seems to be not as RF sensitive as other scanners, at least not on 400Mhz band.
The Uniden BCD536 decodes DMR even with a noisy signal, sometimes better than a proper DMR radio.
The TRX-2 needs a noise free signal to be able to decode. All radios/scanners connected to same antenna and no problem with interfeering transmitters or overload issues, just weak signal monitoring.

/Ubbe

Click to expand...

Funny not sadly is the irony that many of us consider the Unidens (436/536) DEAF on the 400MHz band. In fact that was many of the complains when we were testing all the beta firmware for DMR. It's just another case of "YMMV", your mileage will vary. The GRE/Whistlers in my area and for what I monitor are the best reception radios I have. I still like my Unidens too and use them side by side regularly but those "blanket" statements about something not working for you, therefore must not work for everybody else are innaccurate at best.

I should have written "not as RF sensitive as my other scanners"

I bought both TRX-2 and BCD536 a couple of weeks ago at the same time and the supplier waited 5-6 days before shipping, so I guess they ordered the scanners from Uniden and Whistler they day I made the order. Perhaps Uniden have fixed the deafness in later production scanners.

90% of my monitoring are in the 420MHz band and signal strenghts are low to medium. Maybe TRX-2 have superior strong signal handling but I haven't tested that. Mostly because Whistler didn't include a cigarette lighter cable and I have to make my own. To be fair to Whistler, the TRX-2 have better AM air reception, but due to it's squelch issues that demands a tighter squelch setting, it ends up the same as BCD536.

/Ubbe