BCD536HP scanner

Have this scanner and am trying to program this scanner using the starcom 21 system in Illinois. I live in the southern tip of Illinois and I cannot program the three districts separately from the statewide list. Everytime I think I have it, I open my favorites list and find the full starcom 21 list in my favorites list. How can I program just the three southern districts?

You may be having the same issue I had when I first got my 436. What I believe you should do is just program in all of Starcom21 to whatever FL you want, use location control for where you live and you should only get what's within you location you specify. What you are probably seeing is the sites that are used by departments to communicate with. You need those in there in order to hear anything.

You can also build the FL manually, copy and paste what you need.

When you import a large statewide system, Sentinel brings in everything as you've seen. There are two ways of dealing with this.

One is once imported in Sentinel, you can delete all the "not applicable" sites and departments. It's a little labor intensive for these big systems. Alternatively you can set these "N/A" sites and departments to be avoided. Yet another way is to set up a Quick Key System for them.

If it was me, however, I'd simply set the Location Control to On for the Favorites List. That way the scanner would use the location you set (with the zip code button) and turn off the sites and departments too far away to monitor. That way if you go elsewhere with your scanner, the other parts of the state will still be accessible by just changing your location.

n9owm said:

Have this scanner and am trying to program this scanner using the starcom 21 system in Illinois. I live in the southern tip of Illinois and I cannot program the three districts separately from the statewide list. Everytime I think I have it, I open my favorites list and find the full starcom 21 list in my favorites list. How can I program just the three southern districts?

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It would take too long to type it all up for you. Go here >>> BCDX36HP Sentinel Software Manual


I recommend you set aside 5-6 hours to play with the scanner so you can set it all up PERFECT just the way you want it.

Once you do that? You will LOVE your BCD536HP.

This might you an idea of how to program stuff in your radio. It's a post I made on the forums.

https://forums.radioreference.com/g...ssion/364180-good-old-days-2.html#post2865518

n9owm said:

Have this scanner and am trying to program this scanner using the starcom 21 system in Illinois. I live in the southern tip of Illinois and I cannot program the three districts separately from the statewide list. Everytime I think I have it, I open my favorites list and find the full starcom 21 list in my favorites list. How can I program just the three southern districts?

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You are approaching the problem wrong.

Trunked system talkgroups and departments are not scanned. Only sites are scanned. If you enable Location Control on your favorite list so the scanner only tries to scan nearby system sites, there is zero performance penalty incurred by having all the system talkgroup ID's defined.

Talkgroups and Departments are just database entries that enable the scanner to identify and categorize traffic, instead of just displaying a talkgroup ID number when someone keys up. There is no benefit to deleting most of the system, and a good chance you will screw things up by deleting something important if you attempt to do so.

I am new. But i have found just to import all Starcome21 group but avoid ones i do not want instead of deleting. My particular situation was ISP d-18. The list i found have talkgroups under ISP D18 but the tower are listed farther down on that list. So like discussion above i would open up the talkgroups and also allow the towers to scan might see a difference.

Avoiding departments will not speed scanning up. Avoiding sites manually is no different than using Location Control to not scan distant sites, except Location Control is more likely to lock out the correct sites.

jonwienke said:

Avoiding departments will not speed scanning up.

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It will if the radio is stopping on talkgroups in those unwanted groups...

Avoiding sites manually is no different than using Location Control to not scan distant sites, except Location Control is more likely to lock out the correct sites.

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Maybe.

If you know what you want to listen to, program to monitor only those things you want.