Yue phunny... (we all wish there was)
This is a unique radio in that after spending 700.00 on it then another 100 or more on an outside antenna... it makes it worse... I’m in stand by mode before I’ll buy one, in fact my 100 may go in the classifieds section shortly if this lunacy with the problems keeps up.. crazy
Sitting near 101 and 17 in Phoenix I hear Phx PD dispatch but VERY rarely hear cars and VERY rarely do I hear any other cities, Scottsdale etc.. occasionally do so I know it’s an RF sense overload issue not programming.
Someone from Uniden needs to fly down to Phoenix for a couple days and spend it with someone as knowledgeable as K7 and see what’s going on, is V blowing out our front ends etc. it should have already been done in pre production testing but guess not. I think that’s there only savior at this point. Fixing firmware based on guesses from a dark lab in Japan hoping we eventually luck out and get the right filtering is only going to work so long, till it becomes a hardware issue. It’s starting to appear companies are relying a bit too much on the ‘software’ part of SDR!!!!!!!!!!! It can only do so much!!
Yes, Phoenix is a good test-bed and there was at least one beta tester here. But I believe that he was located in the Northwest Valley where conditions are different than living right in the middle of "the stuff". Ideally (just a fantasy I know), there would be a half dozen beta testers here, in various locations. Had that actually been possible, a wealth of information would have been collected, as Phoenix is an extremely challenging simulcast environment. Some simulcast towers are located quite high-up on towers or mountains, transmitting above a relatively flat surrounding terrain, without a lot of tall buildings. In other words, it's RF hell.
For Phoenix fire, a good test would be to set another scanner to the VHF dispatch frequency for PFD, and you will see just how many dispatched calls you miss on the digital side. Actually the digital side SHOULD hear far more, as on the VHF side some calls are only heard with a good rooftop antenna on the second scanner, as some VHF transmission will come from more distant sites whereas all calls go out on the same simulcast towers, but anyway if you are missing TX's you will know quickly by performing this comparison test.
Simulcast H (Scottsdale) is hard to receive with my SDSs unless I get near Scottsdale.
According to member Ubbe (and he sounds like he has this one nailed down pretty well), the SDR chip used in these scanners suffers from interference from nearby frequencies in a way that is not totally addressable through firmware. It's a hardware limitation. Filters can help, but sometimes don't do the trick. There may not be any great improvement from here on out, but I'm holding out hope.
I would caution against getting upset and selling your SDS just yet, as I and others have found that they serve well for certain things, where other scanners won't work. My SDS200 is the only scanner that can be attached to my rooftop antenna which does a great job on Simulcast A and B, MCSO Smartzone, and AZ Wins, all while being able to add analog (albeit with a lot of white noise as noted previously) to the mix, all in rotation, scanning all together. I can't monitor a handful of digital systems with the SDS200 and rooftop antenna at all, but still, overall I'm pretty happy despite the shortcomings. You may find that the SDS200 can earn its keep in your situation as well.
Overall, the SDS scanners are flawed but useful tools for me. For others they are amazing and perfect (in their individual situations). For some they can't deliver when and where they need to deliver, and they get returned. When the SDS's came out I hoped they would offer the same consistency that a Unication G4/5 does, but that was not to be, given all that a scanner has to do, and given the price point that was set based upon what Uniden knew about their market.
After all is said and done, I honestly think Uniden did what they could with all of the parameters they were trying to work within, and I want to be sure to say that.
