Is it just me or do some channels come in louder than others on the sds200. I need to turn the volume up on some channels and down on others while scanning.
It is not your scanner it is the radio user or how the radio shop setup or did not setup the system. We have a local radio shop takes the repeater out of the box tunes the duplexers programs the radios never test them and hands them to the customers.
Welcome to the "wonderful world of scanning", haha. This is a common problem that is not scanner-specific, and has been addressed in the firmware of most scanners. Volume adjustments on a per-talkgroup/channel/frequency basis are common among both major manufacturers. I would suspect that your SDS200 has that capability as well. If the volume differences are consistent, I would make a compensating adjustment in Sentinel.
Note that when you set a channel to +1 volume or greater, it will no longer be completely silent when the main volume knob is turned down to zero. Not a big deal usually, but it is somewhat annoying.
.
I have one system that just makes me jump when they key up, as it's way louder than anything else. I've turned it down to -3 and it still blasts in most of the time. It's an ambulance company and it's DNR. Signal strength is way up there too, so it must be pretty close to home and work. Kind of the opposite of some of the "mumbling" stuff where you just can't make it out without the volume being up there so if the above system keys up, WOW. I kind of think I'm going to have to raise the level of the "mumblers" and see if that can balance it out without it driving me nuts.
I have one system that just makes me jump when they key up, as it's way louder than anything else. I've turned it down to -3 and it still blasts in most of the time.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it didn't do anything as far as I could tell. Makes me jump every time they key up. It's not common at night, but in the daytime, when I'm not usually listening, it's pretty constant.
In theory, signal strength has nothing to do with received audio level for FMN or FMW. Certainly some of my radios give much less audio for AM transmissions so I have one scanner dedicated to AM and the audio adjusted accordingly - the AGC in the radio should keep the levels reasonably similar. Having said that, you can't control how loud people speak or how close the the microphone they are - base station operators tend to have boom microphones just to the side of their mouth and which are often noise-cancelling which reduces the audio if you are even a couple of inches away from them. I feed most of my audio through a mixer so I can adjust individual inputs easily and I have seen circuits for audio levelling devices (Vogads) but otherwise I'm afraid it's something you just have to live with.
The better the audio amplifier and speaker the more obvious the different audio levels will be due to the higher dynamics.
A less powerfull amplifier in a portable scanner and the very small speaker it uses will have less dynamic, not so big differencies between low and high audio levels. Officers use portable radios with remore mic/speakers and they crank up the volume to hear the low audio transmissions and other loud transmission makes the amplifier and speaker bottom out so that the volume can't increase more.