Just for fun: 2 RH-96 on the same radio

[N9JIG]

I had built a cable to see if I can make the RH-96 work on the rear serial port of a BCD996XT or a BCT15X and it worked fine. Today I was wondering if I could get 2 RH-96's to work on one radio.

I connected one RH-96 to the rear serial port and another to the front serial port and lo and behold they both worked.

I suppose I could also run two by connecting them in parallel from the front serial port as it is a simple 3-wire connection (TX, RX, Ground) but I didn't have a readily available audio splitter to test it.

This brought me back to the days when I was on the FD, we had radios set up with 2 control heads, one for the officer and another for the engineer at the pump station.

While I don't have a need for this at the time it was fun trying it to see if it would work!

 

[gewecke]

Rich this IS sort of interesting, because awhile back a guy had me install a 996 in his motor home with the remote. He was wanting to control it in the rear as well without removing it from its mount. I'll let him know this might be possible, due to your experiment. . Audio can also be split using one of those amplified R/S mobile speakers with a spst switch with a secondary line out jack installed, for a second speaker. 73, n9zas

 

[kandrey89]

Rich this IS sort of interesting, because awhile back a guy had me install a 996 in his motor home with the remote. He was wanting to control it in the rear as well without removing it from its mount. I'll let him know this might be possible, due to your experiment. . Audio can also be split using one of those amplified R/S mobile speakers with a spst switch with a secondary line out jack installed, for a second speaker. 73, n9zas

I'm surprised this is even entertained considering those remote heads are discontinued, hard to find one, much less 2.

 

[SCPD]

Actually this is a great idea. Having an RH-96 head in the radio room and another in the basement to control one 996XLT is very handy. This is another bonus when the scanner works so nicely already. Now to try and find an extra RH-96 that won't break the bank. It's too bad Uniden discontinued the RH-96. Thanks Rich for doing this, I don't think it occurred to anyone to try this.

 

[W8RMH]

We had dual head radios in the fire service back in the early 70s on all our trucks and ambulances.

 

[kandrey89]

I encourage you to write to Uniden and ask that their next desktop/mobile scanner have a built-in remote head just like Whistler's TRX-2. Having it built-in will mean that there's no need for inventory overhead since each scanner will come equipped with a remote head by default and be required for mounted and remote operation.
See my photos here: http://forums.radioreference.com/whistler-scanners/339770-whistler-trx-2-unboxing-photos.html