Limited digital mode scanners

We have many different digital radio system types and their associated different flavors, protocols, and codecs.
Example, dmr flavors: cap, con, tier3, etc. conventional, trunked
Is it time for scanners that only have a few digital modes? A dmr only scanner that scans all flavors of dmr may be one example because of the many dmr modes. May still include am and other fm analog scanning as well. There are so many firmware variables, settings, and adjustments, that these items affect the other digital modes as well. Maybe this fact confuses digital and analog scanning overall, when there are too many variables needed to make just one mode work well. Adjust for dmr and it will affect nxdn or p25!
And then there is hardware: sensitivity, selectivity, signal to noise, squelch, etc. Hardware can be tweaked to favor specific modes.

One size does not fit all, anymore!

73, john

vocoder said:

Is it time for scanners that only have a few digital modes?73, john

Click to expand...

Has been discussed many times before. Highly unlikely in my opinion not a big enough market for it.

If someone built scanners like that, some will buy them.
However, later on these people will wish they hadn't bought one since they will want to have one that can receive almost all of the modes.

There's also the issues of proprietary modes (i.e. Open Sky) that manufacturers don't want to give up due to competitive advantages...Mike

A solution might be to do what LMR manufacturers have done.
You buy a radio with analog and a specific digital mode.
Then you buy activation licenses for the features you want to add.

With software defined radios, this probably makes the most sense from a manufacturing/support standpoint. The radio is capable of digital, but the customer turns on only what they need.