Update!
My original HP1 went off to Fort Worth today to the scanner hospital. But I purchased another one in the intervening time, because I ultimately intend to have one at home and one in the car.
I put the SD card from the broken one in the new one, and I have to confess something - it's not 8gb. It is 4gb. My apologies.
However, today, after days and days of continuous recording, just now in fact, I got the message "Disk nearly full. Recording stopped." So, I immediately came here and prepared to post my findings!
I have recordings from January 16 thru February 07, every day being represented by several log entries in the "Review Recordings" screen on the HP1. And when I connect it to the PC...
- Windows Explorer properties report 3.18GB of 3.68GB are used up, with 512MB free.
- The 'G:\HomePatrol\audio\' folder contains 2.86GB/3,081,112,200 bytes of files (size on disk: 3.14GB/3,380,084,736 bytes), a total of 16,670 files in 178 folders.
- MediaMonkey (see below for an explanation of what this is and what I'm using it for) reports 53 hours, 22 minutes, 11 seconds of audio.
About MediaMonkey: This is one of those programs that manages a music library (of mp3/etc files). Because of the way Uniden has structured the audio recordings on the HP1, it makes an ideal program for managing/cataloging your HP1 recordings as well. If you point MediaMonkey at the HP1's "drive" (it appears in Windows as a removable storage device), recordings pop up in the following fashion:
- "Artist" = the System (top bar of the HP1 screen);
- "Genre" = the Group or Department (middle bar);
- "Title" = the Channel or Talkgroup (bottom bar).
You can also show the entire path, the "song length", and the "size on disk". One quirk, and I'm not sure if it's with MediaMonkey, with the HP1, or just due to the nature of .WAV files, but I have a TON of files with no audio at all in them, which state they are 420 bytes long and are 74 hours, 33 minutes, and 55 seconds long each. (I deleted them before reporting on the time-recorded shown above.)
Looks like 2gb should be just fine for anyone. If you plan to be recording for weeks at a time and wanting to save everything, and not move it off onto a PC, you can try a 4gb. There's probably never going to be any reason to go higher than 4gb in this current design - it'd just be wasted space.
