Two Questions.

[sm3000]

Ok. Forgive me if this is posted elsewhere. I have a question. If the answer is actually posted somewhere on RR, please let me know via a link and I'll go read it...I couldn't find it for the life of me.

What's a discriminator tap? I see people talking about them on here, and I decided to go to the Wiki, but it didn't quite explain it to me ... I just saw pictures n stuff, but no real "description" of what it does.

And secondly, what benefits are there to having a 'tap' on your scanner?

Just curious.

 

[Saint]

Tap

Ok. Forgive me if this is posted elsewhere. I have a question. If the answer is actually posted somewhere on RR, please let me know via a link and I'll go read it...I couldn't find it for the life of me.

What's a discriminator tap? I see people talking about them on here, and I decided to go to the Wiki, but it didn't quite explain it to me ... I just saw pictures n stuff, but no real "description" of what it does.

And secondly, what benefits are there to having a 'tap' on your scanner?

Just curious.

This may be of some felp to you.
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Discriminator_output
Steve

 

[exkalibur]

A discriminator tap allows you to get baseband audio. In a radio, received audio goes through some filtering to remove all the junk outside of the pass band - on real radios this also filters out PL/DPL tones. However, most types of data use audio frequencies that fall outside of the passband, or are otherwise molested by the filtering. If you are trying to decode said data, having it filtered out/molested by the filter in the radio, you aren't going to have favourable results.

However, tapping the audio BEFORE the filter (IE, direct from the discrimiator), bypasses any of this allowing you to get exactly what is received.

Unless you plan on running software to decode data transmitted over the air, such as ACARS, ATCS, POCSAG, Control Channel data, etc... - there's no benifit to the average user.

 

[mikewazowski]

Unless you plan on running software to decode data transmitted over the air, such as ACARS,

ACARS is AM and doesn't require a discriminator tap since the discriminator is not involved.

Use your headphone jack and you'll be fine.