The more I read about others and the more I learn about mine, I'm coming to the conclusion that SDS200 setups are like snowflakes....no two are alike... 
Mine arrived Friday 4/5 and before I updated the firmware to 1.09.02 I of course connected it to the antenna it will be using, applied power, fired it up, and punched in my zipcode. Everything sounded dandy! So I updated to the latest firmware and fat (actually skinny) dumb and happy I proceeded to buy my DMR and NXDN keys, not necessarily because there was anything on those two modes that I could not live without, but "because I could"....you know the drill!
The keys went in fine, I heard both DMR and NXDN traffic, the audio was great, and then everything appeared to go to hell. It started to dawn on me that I was not hearing diddly from several conventional 800 MHz police frequencies in my area. All are in the 855 MHz range and all use digital coded squelch. I fired up the BCD536HP that I had up locally for sale, and it didn't take long for traffic on these 855 MHz conventional frequencies to appear. Yet...zilch on the SDS200. However, the local zone for the MA State Police Motorola type II system was loud and clear. It darned well should be as the tower for this site is about 1.5 miles from my house on a hill. Well for that matter the others should be loud and clear too....they always had been on the other scanners. CLEARLY something was wrong with my new $700 (actually make that about $810 with the DMR and NXDN keys) purchase...good God.
To make matters worse, I proceeded to manually enter the frequencies in question into the SDS200 one at a time and wait for traffic to appear on the 536HP. First Falmouth at 855.4625, full scale as usual on the 536HP, but totally unreadable on the SDS200 unless I turned the squelch to 0 (no DCS in use at this point with the manual entry). Even then it was virtually impossible to hear anything intelligible. Worse yet, Sandwich PD at 855.1125 was absolutely non-existent.
Needless to say I was not amused and uttered a few adjectives about my new paperweight....I may have referred to it as once or twice during my rant as well...
I consulted Jeff at Hamstation and explained my situation to him. This is why I deal with Jeff. He made arrangements to send me a new one on Monday 4/8. So this took the edge off a bit and I decided to continue to play and learn about the scanner so I would be rolling along nicely when the replacement arrived. So I did, and as I monitored with the squelch off I noticed I was hearing something "other than normal" in the mud along with the open squelch. Remember that local zone for the MA State Police system I was talking about a few paragraphs ago? Yeah, that....mixed into the mud and smearing my reception. I then programmed in the Nantucket 800 MHz P25 TRS which is over 30 miles distant, more than 3 times farther distant than the departments I was not receiving locally. Lo and behold....you guessed it, loud and clear. Its CC is at 857.7125 and its voice frequencies are about 1 MHz away from what seemed to be my offending signal.
I've gone on long enough and I've probably lost 75% of the people that started reading this diatribe. Suffice to say I spent as much time over the weekend as I could without being antisocial with loved ones and friends. During that period of time I began to find combinations of using filters to improve the aforementioned and other reception issues. For the 855 MHz frequencies that were being interfered with by the super-strong control channel of the MSP system at 855.5375, I used the IFX and the "Invert" filter. Suddenly the dead frequencies sprang to life as strong as I've heard them on my other scanners. I had and have other problems in the VHF-HI band, some I've made better, some are a work in progress. I still have not even begun with UHF. I believe the final culprit in all cases will be very strong signals in close proximity to my area. I could be wrong but it seems to make sense. Meanwhile the sensitivity on other VHF-HI frequencies appears to be superb, possibly better than prior scanners I have owned.
If there is a definitive list of what these filters do out there somewhere, I'd like to see it more readily available going forward. They DO make a difference, to be certain!
Yet I'm pretty convinced I could take this scanner to another location and have entirely different results. It appears that this is just the nature of these SDR beasts. I have seen so many different reports regarding the performance of this scanner after the update to this firmware. Some are having superb results. Others not so much. I truly thought I had a bad radio out of the box. But sticking with it and working through it now tells me otherwise, and that I can overcome these problems in a high RF environment. It is the hardest I've ever worked to get a scanner to hear what I want to hear, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the next firmware upgrade will undo some of this work, but I think it may just be worth it to stick with this monster.
I would like to see the filter setting for each channel somehow become more quickly available than having to drill down 250 levels into the menu to change it. And I see nowhere in Sentinel that provides for the IFX setting to be stored per channel either. Maybe I'm missing that. I have not uploaded to the scanner again since I made these fixes.
And given that this is a SDR....that big screen would make for a nice spectrum display.... ..... but let's get the basics smoothed out first. For now Jeff is most certainly off the hook for the replacement scanner! I'm willing to be at this point it would have acted exactly the same as the current one.
Mine arrived Friday 4/5 and before I updated the firmware to 1.09.02 I of course connected it to the antenna it will be using, applied power, fired it up, and punched in my zipcode. Everything sounded dandy! So I updated to the latest firmware and fat (actually skinny) dumb and happy I proceeded to buy my DMR and NXDN keys, not necessarily because there was anything on those two modes that I could not live without, but "because I could"....you know the drill!
The keys went in fine, I heard both DMR and NXDN traffic, the audio was great, and then everything appeared to go to hell. It started to dawn on me that I was not hearing diddly from several conventional 800 MHz police frequencies in my area. All are in the 855 MHz range and all use digital coded squelch. I fired up the BCD536HP that I had up locally for sale, and it didn't take long for traffic on these 855 MHz conventional frequencies to appear. Yet...zilch on the SDS200. However, the local zone for the MA State Police Motorola type II system was loud and clear. It darned well should be as the tower for this site is about 1.5 miles from my house on a hill. Well for that matter the others should be loud and clear too....they always had been on the other scanners. CLEARLY something was wrong with my new $700 (actually make that about $810 with the DMR and NXDN keys) purchase...good God.
To make matters worse, I proceeded to manually enter the frequencies in question into the SDS200 one at a time and wait for traffic to appear on the 536HP. First Falmouth at 855.4625, full scale as usual on the 536HP, but totally unreadable on the SDS200 unless I turned the squelch to 0 (no DCS in use at this point with the manual entry). Even then it was virtually impossible to hear anything intelligible. Worse yet, Sandwich PD at 855.1125 was absolutely non-existent.
Needless to say I was not amused and uttered a few adjectives about my new paperweight....I may have referred to it as
once or twice during my rant as well...I consulted Jeff at Hamstation and explained my situation to him. This is why I deal with Jeff. He made arrangements to send me a new one on Monday 4/8. So this took the edge off a bit and I decided to continue to play and learn about the scanner so I would be rolling along nicely when the replacement arrived. So I did, and as I monitored with the squelch off I noticed I was hearing something "other than normal" in the mud along with the open squelch. Remember that local zone for the MA State Police system I was talking about a few paragraphs ago? Yeah, that....mixed into the mud and smearing my reception. I then programmed in the Nantucket 800 MHz P25 TRS which is over 30 miles distant, more than 3 times farther distant than the departments I was not receiving locally. Lo and behold....you guessed it, loud and clear. Its CC is at 857.7125 and its voice frequencies are about 1 MHz away from what seemed to be my offending signal.
I've gone on long enough and I've probably lost 75% of the people that started reading this diatribe. Suffice to say I spent as much time over the weekend as I could without being antisocial with loved ones and friends. During that period of time I began to find combinations of using filters to improve the aforementioned and other reception issues. For the 855 MHz frequencies that were being interfered with by the super-strong control channel of the MSP system at 855.5375, I used the IFX and the "Invert" filter. Suddenly the dead frequencies sprang to life as strong as I've heard them on my other scanners. I had and have other problems in the VHF-HI band, some I've made better, some are a work in progress. I still have not even begun with UHF. I believe the final culprit in all cases will be very strong signals in close proximity to my area. I could be wrong but it seems to make sense. Meanwhile the sensitivity on other VHF-HI frequencies appears to be superb, possibly better than prior scanners I have owned.
If there is a definitive list of what these filters do out there somewhere, I'd like to see it more readily available going forward. They DO make a difference, to be certain!
Yet I'm pretty convinced I could take this scanner to another location and have entirely different results. It appears that this is just the nature of these SDR beasts. I have seen so many different reports regarding the performance of this scanner after the update to this firmware. Some are having superb results. Others not so much. I truly thought I had a bad radio out of the box. But sticking with it and working through it now tells me otherwise, and that I can overcome these problems in a high RF environment. It is the hardest I've ever worked to get a scanner to hear what I want to hear, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the next firmware upgrade will undo some of this work, but I think it may just be worth it to stick with this monster.
I would like to see the filter setting for each channel somehow become more quickly available than having to drill down 250 levels into the menu to change it. And I see nowhere in Sentinel that provides for the IFX setting to be stored per channel either. Maybe I'm missing that. I have not uploaded to the scanner again since I made these fixes.
And given that this is a SDR....that big screen would make for a nice spectrum display....
..... but let's get the basics smoothed out first. For now Jeff is most certainly off the hook for the replacement scanner! I'm willing to be at this point it would have acted exactly the same as the current one.
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