According to the manual:
I appreciate the help.
I may do the firmware upgrade this evening. I've got my cable in the box for the 296D I know and I'll have to find that converter that I had that would go between the 9 pin or whatever it is PC hook up cable and the back of a modern-day computer. I know that I have all this stuff around the house somewhere but locating some of it may take a little while? Much obliged...! BTW, I wouldn't mind finding some more 796D radios at a good price. Actually they probably don't even need to be the D model. That has been a great receiver for the military aviation band even though united in had not quite set up the defaults right for that range of frequencies and you had to manually go in and change any channel that had a 25kHz step size needed or you'd have to do it through the software. But as far as receiving an audio goes, I still use my 796D today to listen to the local fighter squadrons going up and fighting each other in one of the local MOAs. It seems to be a really sensitive receiver that does great at blocking unwanted signals at the same time. I've been meaning to see if the 296D will work is good and I've been thinking about programming mine up as a 1000 channel military aviation band receiver If it does work as well. I never did like that boat wheel or paddle boat wheel that was on the scanner, but other than that, it actually did a great job and I enjoyed using it. The only problem is I barely used it before the dynamic memory radios came out so I put it back in the box to preserve it for a long time. I bought a NIMH battery for it last year and I believe it was a 2,400 mAh battery that wasn't available back in the day of those battery packs. And I just finally started using it here in the last week. Since it has the digital card in it I might program in a few other things in the area of interest and put it to use now. I'll definitely wait it long enough haha.
I have not found any difference in the digital cards and I have interchanged them and they work in either the 250 or the 296. However a card from a 296 placed into a 250 will not follow p25 trunking. The 296 has hardware that the 250 does not.
I have used both the 296D and 796D on 800 MHz rebanded systems. They will both do P25 Phase 1 trunked systems. The v3_60 firmware update enabled rebanding. Neither radio will accept 700 MHz frequencies.
Very interesting discussion. I owned both radios, the bc250d was first in 2003 and was the first digital scanner made by Uniden. It could do p16 type II smartzone systems but it couldn't do p25 but could do p25 conventional as has been mentioned. The 296 was 9600 baud and could do p25 tracking.
The 296 followed a little less than six months later. The card was included with the 296 as standard. It was an option with the bc250d. If you didn't need to go digital, it could serve as an analog scanner.
296 displayed more information. Obvious p25 data information, you could see your tag associated with the TG when you were in ID search mode. 296 had 6.25 steps, it also downloaded faster.
Just trying to remember any other big factors and I remember there was the 800 megahertz rebanding issue. A 250d was incapable of rebanding and the 296 was. That was a major issue at the time.
That was a long time ago but it seems like yesterday. Wish I could remember more. Everything I can remember has been covered well here.
GRE/RS had introduced the pro 96 at the same time. There was a very distinct difference in modulation between the pro 96 and the Unidens. The Unidens always had a muffled muddy modulation and the GRE had crisp clear audio. That was always a contentious debate here on RR.
I'll leave that one alone.
