Pro-94
The PRO-94 was my first trunking scanner and I have to be honest, I hated that thing! I never felt like I understood a thing about it. I think it was at least 10 years ago that I bought it, the book was horrible and there weren’t so many web resources to get help as there are now. It sat in a drawer for probably the last 7 years. Every now and then I would pull it out, twiddle with it a while, and shove it back in the drawer. It wasn’t until about 2 months ago that I decided I should get a new scanner, so I picked up a BR330T. I’ll tell you with the dynamic memory, alpha tags, pc programming, and radio reference, I was up and running in no time and actually had a much better understanding of what was going on.
Anyway, my new found understanding of how the systems actually worked allowed me to dust off the old PRO-94 and put it to work again. As a matter of fact it is feeding a live feed here now. In early scanners frequencies were thought of as the channels, a police department might use one frequency as channel A and a second frequency as channel B. With trunking the frequencies are not really the channels, a conversation on a particular channel could be on any of the frequencies of the system. The talkgroups are the real channels.
So what you want to do is decided what channels (talkgroups) you want to monitor and program them into group lists. As another poster mentioned you can also “search” talkgroups of a system which means the radio will stop and monitor any talkgroup it comes across. This is a great way to find new groups, but is not ideal for monitoring because you don’t want the radio stopping on the sanitation department talking about the next dumpster they need to get during a high speed police pursuit! This is where I went wrong with my PRO-94. I didn’t really understand the talkgroup lists which are “scanned” versus “searching” for talkgroups across the system. So I would have the scanner in “search” mode and just lockout the talkgroups that I didn’t want to hear. Over time it was hard to know exactly what was on/off, etc.
