P25 reception in Tacoma

[shrubby]

I wasn't sure if it was more appropriate post this here or in the Uniden forum so I'll start here and ask what other people's experience has been. When Tacoma switched to P25 I went and got a 436 and after a bit go it dialed in to where I could listen to law enforcement / city services / emergency services without issue. It seems like now, after having the scanner for just about a year and having installed all of the firmware updates I hear way less than I used to. A lot of the time I will catch just the last 2 or 3 seconds of a transmission if at all. Sometimes, it will go 20, 30, 45 minutes between transmissions.

I've tried resetting it to factory and have updated the frquencies from the latest available here. I've tried upgrading the antenna (for what its worth I seem to do he best with the antennae from my old RadioShack Pro 163) And when I do pick something up, it's garbled and cuts out. I never had this issue when it was new.

Have others experienced this and if so what can be done about it? Any help would be greatly appreciated as it's very frustrating to have spent all this money and to have the experience deteriorate to the point of being basically unusable.

One other weird thing that may or may not be relevant is that I seem to have better luck with picking up neighboring cities. I live at the top of 30th st hill in Tacoma which is just about the highest point in the city, yet I pick up Lakewood, Puyallup, Summer and Bonnie Lake better than Tacoma.

Frustrating.

Thanks
Shrubby

 

[SCPD]

There are plenty of threads about this already. Set your thread limit to LAST YEAR and you'll see a lot of the older posts.

 

[shrubby]

Thanks Nickcarr. I've read some of those and wasn't sure if they applied since my scanner used to work much better. What I read had to do with setting the 'band defaults' to FM and a few other things that didn't seem to help. I'll research a bit more since this seems to be a known issue.

 

[b1100mac]

shrubby, you must have missed my earlier reply, my 436 works great on all the tacoma/pierce county stuff, send me an instant message with your contact info and i will program your radio correctly in about 10 seconds with my software that is already complete. Then you can transfer that info from your radio, to your copy of sentennel and you should be all dialed in,,,mac