Personally, my take is that it's likely related to interference from local high power 800 mhz transmitters that the SDS handles better than the PSR. All of my digital PSRs/PROs (500/600/800, 197/106) had the appearance of being much more sensitive than any Uniden (at the time that i owned said scanners), but they suffered horribly when in a strong signal environment.
I'm betting your SDS (especially with the different filter options available) simply is more capable of copying farther away systems on 800 mhz in the presence of strong local 800 mhz signals, whereas the PSR just doesn't have what it takes to deal with that.
I do agree with you, Mike. I've driven around a bit through Stark County, mainly between Louisville and the Strip, taking 62 & 77 (usually going to work/home) and have at times let both my Radio Shack Pro 106 and my SDS100 scan Summit County's MARCS site and even Stark's. In some cases the 106 seems to be a tad more sensitive, but honestly I'd rather be able to filter the noise. These days with everything wireless the noise is growing. And with better filtering, the 100 certainly has outperformed any radio I've owned in the past.
For Summit's site, I pretty much don't hear the CC or even see much activity until I'm well into the county on the 106. But with the 100 I can hear Summit pretty much from Louisville all the way to 77 unless I'm right by a cell tower. Even the errors are low. And I've never been able to do that before with any other radio.
As for Stark, I can sit at 62& California Ave. and monitor Stark's site with both radios. On the 106, it's completely choppy and garbled, I can barely get a single word out of it. But the 100 performs absolutely perfectly and the error rate stays at zero. The reason this is usually a tough spot is that there is a cell tower about 3,000 feet directly to the west of the intersection
For any of my past radios, I pretty much had to use the attenuation when I left the Louisville area. But the 100 performs perfectly on MARCS, I certainly have no complaints.
One thing that I am experimenting with is the IFX. This is my first Uniden, so I honestly don't know much about the feature other than what I've read. I first experimented by just doing a search on an inactive voice channel on Stark County's site, and opened up the squelch. I parked my 106 on the closest Stark voice channel to that one, and waited for a transmission. on the 106. As soon as there was one, there was a bit of a disturbance on the 100. So I applied the IFX and waited for another transmission on the 106. But this time there was no disturbance.
So then I sat near a cell tower, but picked a spot that i could still hear Summit's control channel while in search mode. I payed close attention to the digital error rates as I flipped the IFX on and off and with it on it did seem to decode much better.
But once back at the house there isn't much noise. With the IFX on Summit's CC it seems to attenuate the signal a bit. At least a weak signal. I'm not sure. Has anyone else experimented with this and have any results to share? I don't think IFX will completely get rid of all the noise and whatnot, but it certainly did seem to help when near cell towers or have bleedover from adjacent channels. Anyway, I've been messing with it and just thought I'd share.
I still want to try with a single site, and maybe soon I'll try the same with the Minerva site and see how it does. I also want to drive through some counties just to see how both radios perform on various sites and locations.
