Why I stopped using Unitrunker

[K8TEK]

First off, let me start by thanking Rick (Unitrunker) for all the work he put into his program. It has really helped me enjoy the hobby more than I used to.

After playing with other programs, I have found that Unitrunker is missing quite a bit. First off, Unitrunker does not show you messages the zone controller sends out, such as requests for affiliations, rejections or even show you when a user presses an emergency button. Secondly, Unitrunker fails to track radio talkgroup affiliations. Lets take Trunk88 for example. I can query a radio to see what talkgroups it affiliated with and how many PTTs there were for each talkgroup. Unitrunker does not have a way to easily identify what talkgroups a radio affiliated with after it purges it's history every 4 hours. The only way to accurately obtain this information is to go through hundreds of cryptic log files. That shouldn't be purged, radios not generating any traffic on the other hand; should be purged from their affiliation after 4 hours. I have radios that haven't been on the system for 6 months, yet Unitrunker is still reporting them affiliated with a talkgroup.

Next is the missing data bug that has yet to be fixed. Before I go to bed for the evening, I look at the statistics for a system and see 6,000 radios and 520 talkgroups. When I wake up in the morning, I see the same system with 5,920 radios and 500 talkgroups. I know this doesn't seem like an issue, but it really makes running the software for tracking anything completly useless.

Those are just some of the reasons I abandoned Unitrunker in favor of Trunk88. It displays more information and actually keeps track of talkgroups and radios. Give it a try! You would be surprised what you have been missing.

[jpryor]

I've yet to find a good replacement for the legacy Trunker application, I've tried Unitrunker and others, hopefully someday they will be fully useful. Unitrunker does have many promising features. I did use Trunk88 for a while many years ago, and good to see there has been some more recent development. I'll probably hold off on moving my Ohio MARCS trunker logging to anything though, unless maybe Pro96Com is opened up for 3600 baud systems. I've built a pretty decent web interface for the Lucas County P25 data that comes from the Pro96Com package in more or less real time.

[FlashP]

I'm still running Trunker continuously. It's the only one that's truly real-time interactive: I can almost instantly hold on talkgroups, or edit radios as fast as they come up on the display.

[brandon]

UniTrunker is absolutely fantastic but I continue with trunker/etrunk since the files can be managed with TrunkerDM. It's a great tool for sorting through affiliations, new talkgroups, tag radios, etc.

[Forts]

TrunkerDM is indeed a very handy program. It's a shame there hasn't been any support for it the past few years.

[DiGiTaLD]

While Unitrunker surely has it's issues, I'm not abandoning it for two reasons. I love the GUI. I did get used to running the old, non-GUI version, but it took a while. The GUI is comparatively so easy to use. Trunk88 would require me to learn all over again, and I'm lazy.

Also, I have hundreds upon hundreds of positively identified radios in Unitrunker's database gathered over almost two solid years of monitoring. I really don't want to start from scratch with another program.

[PeterGV]

Originally Posted by jpryor

I've yet to find a good replacement for the legacy Trunker application, I've tried Unitrunker and others, hopefully someday they will be fully useful.

Agreed. As quirky and weird as original MTrunker (ported to Win32) is, it still beat Unitrunker for my personal application. AND there's source code for it, which (to me at least) is a MAJOR plus.

My biggest Unitrunker issue is what the OP referred to as "the missing data bug" -- I live in an area where reception of one of my favorite systems tends to fade in and out, and this bug has cost me many, many, lost hours of monitoring.

I'm grateful for Rick's work to date, and I can only hope he'll have the energy to continue his development of Unitrunker so it can one day be the software of my dreams. And, speaking of nirvana, maybe Rick will someday release the source code for the ISW/OSW decoding...

Peter
K1PGV

[letarotor]

Still running Trunker 3.8.3 on P75 DOS machine 24/7 on our local system in which my unit has subscription radios on. I think UniTrunker is great, but I'm just too comfortable with the old standard. I suspect I will be forced to learn the glitches in UniTrunker when our system re-bands, but for now, it can't beat the old Trunker for monitoring a system and reaction tuning a second scanner to monitor specific talkgroups or radios and check affiliations.

[CompKing]

Read this thread, tried Trunk88, and really liked what I saw. I am now a convert.. Out with Unitrunker (for now until I can at least voice monitor properly)