wfncnews
Member
I've lurked for a long time and obtained a lot of good information from this forum but I think this is my first post asking for help so thank you in advance.
I received my new BCD436 last week and looked forward to upgrading from my trusty GRE PSR-500 which has served me very well all these years.
The 436 has a number of features I'm looking forward to using but a couple of bummers along the way. The tone out monitoring was a bit of a let down that it does not monitor and alert during regular favorite scanning with a tone and dispatch. But there are awesome iPhone apps I'm using for that now so not a huge loss.
CHOPPY
My biggest complaint at the moment is the choppiness of the 800 VIPER trunked channels. The only change I've made to the radio was to replace the original antenna. It was giving me the same choppy issue and was a bit to stiff to fit in the car mount without smashing against the windshield. So I replaced it with a highly recommended 800MHz Scanner Antenna Model: 20-283 from Radio Shack.
I've tried a number of different configurations but for the most part attenuator on or off and digital AGC on or off does not seem to fix/change the issue at all.
In fact I will admit to not really knowing if those settings do anything at all.
My scanner is not jammed with sites or talk groups. I'm only monitoring my local police and FD so thats two sites and about 40 TGs on four favorite lists.
It seems every transmission is broken up and choppy even though I live about 5 miles from one of the VIPER broadcast sites. The front of most conversations is clipped but there is almost not a single transmission which is not broken up.
I have the system squelch left on 2. When I tried 1 it was just too sensitive and gets stuck on a few of the VHF channels.
Does anyone have any suggestions I could try to get ride of the choppiness and make the unit useful?
I received my new BCD436 last week and looked forward to upgrading from my trusty GRE PSR-500 which has served me very well all these years.
The 436 has a number of features I'm looking forward to using but a couple of bummers along the way. The tone out monitoring was a bit of a let down that it does not monitor and alert during regular favorite scanning with a tone and dispatch. But there are awesome iPhone apps I'm using for that now so not a huge loss.
CHOPPY
My biggest complaint at the moment is the choppiness of the 800 VIPER trunked channels. The only change I've made to the radio was to replace the original antenna. It was giving me the same choppy issue and was a bit to stiff to fit in the car mount without smashing against the windshield. So I replaced it with a highly recommended 800MHz Scanner Antenna Model: 20-283 from Radio Shack.
I've tried a number of different configurations but for the most part attenuator on or off and digital AGC on or off does not seem to fix/change the issue at all.
In fact I will admit to not really knowing if those settings do anything at all.
My scanner is not jammed with sites or talk groups. I'm only monitoring my local police and FD so thats two sites and about 40 TGs on four favorite lists.
It seems every transmission is broken up and choppy even though I live about 5 miles from one of the VIPER broadcast sites. The front of most conversations is clipped but there is almost not a single transmission which is not broken up.
I have the system squelch left on 2. When I tried 1 it was just too sensitive and gets stuck on a few of the VHF channels.
Does anyone have any suggestions I could try to get ride of the choppiness and make the unit useful?