You gave me some good ideas in your color scheme. I like the way you colored the signal strength meter red. I've still got too much white text up in that area on my 100 and 200 screens and sometimes miss seeing what the signal strength is due to my being legally blind. I had changed my Record text to red and it makes it a lot easier for me to look and see if I have that feature turned on or off. And I also played with the background colors so that when it's actually recording voice it is even a little more obvious to me. I'm going to change my signal strength to red and do some more playing around with both of my radio screen color configurations.
Also, there is something that can help with signals and digital errors analysis I added to my screen. I chose to put the D-ERROR in place of the battery voltage on my screens. After all, all I have to do is press down on the top volume / squelch / other functions knob on top of the SDS100 radio and it will still show me the battery voltage at the bottom right of the screen.
It's been 6 months since I was last up there in the Clackamas County / Multnomah County areas. I had my SDS100 with me on that trip and it seem to do very well on 90% of what I was listening to. I was staying down in Wilsonville and not receiving Portland until I got further north. But whenever we would go out and do various things oh, I would usually receive Portland very well.
I also noticed the degradation in conventional frequencies in the UHF and VHF bands when compared to my BCD436HP I also had brought. I didn't bring any of my older digital scanners to compare with the 436 but the 436 did seem to do a better job monitoring agencies like Salem on their UHF frequencies. I was using both my 800 MHz and dual band rubber ducky antennas most of the time. I did bring my GPS puck and a Tram magnetic antenna I used as we drove out to Mount Hood and Multnomah Falls. And it did a great job on the SDS100. On my previous trip two years earlier, I use the GPS Puck on the 436 when we drove out to Seaside, Oregon and it did a great job as well. But I don't believe there were any simulcast radio systems on that drive in 2016.
I enjoyed watching your videos and it's just making me want to hurry up and get up to the Portland area for my final move more and more. I'll be living up there hopefully this year. But it's a pain in the butt trying to get things done when the move is 2000 miles away and you have to get help with everything including driving. But I think that will be an enjoyable drive coming from the Fort Worth area and being on the passenger side with cross country radio monitoring going on
I literally recorded almost everything the two weeks I was in Portland the last time in 2018. I wanted to be able to go back on my 100 scanner recordings and see exactly what I was hearing, especially when I wasn't able to see it, and analyze how the different radio systems sounded from where I was staying or traveling at the time.
Has Portland made a move over to the newer radio system since September of last year? I wasn't staying with an old girlfriend that had any radio knowledge so I wasn't really sure if there were changes still occurring back in September of 2018. I see that your favorites list tag for the Portland traffic says 700 MHz and I'm trying to remember if they were using that at the time I was there or not?
I'm noticing that my SDS200 is doing an even better job than my SDS100 on the Fort Worth Regional Radio System which is a simulcast system where I live now. It is definitely outperforming the 100 on the simulcast 700 / 800 MHz traffic and even on the P25 Phase 1 VHF TRS traffic. And I've even got a Stridsberg 4 port multicoupler I'm using so the radios are hooked up to the same antenna with no signal loss.
I'm trying to keep up with what changes are occurring up in the northern Oregon area just so that I know what to change in my own programming before I finally get moved up there.
Thanks for the videos and ideas. And thanks for any additional information also.
Brian (COMMSCAN)
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