A full featured scanner

[gbowne1]

Well, yes, thats understood. There would have to be some interconnectablity so you could hook up a second reciever and have it compatible.. so you could even send your latest catches to something like a Pro-96 or other desktop/mobile/base/HT, etc. where it would follow the other parts of the conversations that may get missed. Connect up something like the RS USB IF programming cord, and you now have a seperate following receiver. People with RS, GRE, Uniden's, AOR's, maybe others of any kind could possibly work depending on their hardware set & features

How about add in cards/options and accessories? Active antennas, discones, preamps? Maybe something a little like the old OptoScan?

I already talked about adding support for ScanCAT. Any others?

Greg

 

[K8TEK]

How about just a scanner that will monitor a SmartZone system with digital voice without motorboating?

 

[gbowne1]

That would be nice too.. I have a couple systems here that do that frequently.

Greg

 

[scannerfreak]

How about just a scanner that will monitor a SmartZone system with digital voice without motorboating?

That would be called the PSR 500 and PSR 600

 

[gbowne1]

You' right about that. I was also thinking about a small LCD front panel display with backlight that has buttons surrounding it like a lot of ICOM's (and others) do.

Power on / off should have a status light. For standby, off and on.

Multiple receivers? Would these be internal virtual receivers? How so?

Greg

 

[Hoofy]

Maybe instead of a scanner the size of a computer tower that has a zillion features and tries to cover the whole spectrum you should consider building multiple scanners with narrow and specific freq ranges at a reasonable price. Without a boat load of receivers you can only hear one channel at a time.
If you built a digital trunking scanner (700 to 900mhz) for a reasonable price you would sell lots of them in Michigan and soon nationwide.
I have 3 rs digital scanners and they only scan about a dozen non trunking freqs. I have another scanner for air and milair freqs, one dedicated to local fire and utilities, 2 ham radios that also cover the local fire freqs. and marine freqs. and a general coverage ham hf rig for the other stuff. Many of these are on all the time we are in town.
As has been stated before when something important to the area is happening a single scanner is going to leave you wanting.

So if you build many different scanners with narrow receive parameters you end up with a better receiver that doesn't have to be so wide open and then filters would be a practical answer for the overpowering local interference.

 

[gbowne1]

There may be no other way around that caveat, but that's the thing I am trying to avoid.

I've got about a half dozen or more RS scanners that don't do much more than the first one I bought.
I don't wanna have to go out and buy a half dozen more just to get the same out of what I already have.

Remember they are not all "bells and whistles" many of these things are very useful.

Keeping that in mind.. you could develop a analog and digital trunking scanner either desktop o

I'm not just trying to reinvent the wheel here or to build a better mouse trap just trying to further our hobby.. perhaps make things a little to a lot easier.

Greg

 

[JoeyC]

Somebody must have won a lottery here...

 

[zz0468]

Well, I will readily admit to being highly skeptical of this project, especially at the proposed price. But let's just say something will actually come of this, and it at least gets to the prototype stage. Unless I missed something, there's a feature that is of utmost importance that has barely been mentioned, and virtually every consumer grade scanner falls way short on - RF performance. It's been touched on slightly in the form of a "robust" or "hot" front end. But you gotta be specific.

Most of the proposed features could come in the form of a software define radio. What's missing is a synthesizer with good phase noise - no trivial task to get good phase noise AND fast scan rates. But it's been done. Wouldn't it be nice to hear a full quieting signal actually fully quiet the receiver!?

How about an uncrunchable front end? There are devices out there that will give .25 DB noise figure and nearly 40 dbm IP3. How about high side injection, with a first IF in the low microwave region to eliminate images. Varacter tuned tracking filters?

Forget the mishmash of antenna connectors. Use N connectors, and as few as is practical. Put the effort into the front end, and make a standard off the shelf PC or laptop the brains behind the thing. And put the sound card to work.

How about a high stability 10 MHz reference oscillator, and a ref in/out port for those freaks among us who like to clock everything off a rubidium source. Then, you could add ACCURATE software based deviation and frequency meters. The hams could use it as a poor man's service monitor.

Ok... I've gone as far out on the limb with this as I care to go. But as a potential future customer, I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten foot pole if the synthesizer noise and IP3 specs aren't available and up to snuff.

 

[WPXN]

How about upper and lower sideband,,, I didn't see that anywhere in your building plans..

 

[gbowne1]

Hey all,

ZZ, I expected people to be skeptical of it.. and NO you didn't miss a thing here. Actually I thought of this like a Open source project much like the SDR. We could design a platform, build it, then people could perhaps build their own add ins, what have you.

What scanner enthusasist (etc.) wouldn't want a really nice rig that could be software controlled, programmed, etc. much like the SDR did with their project, even the SoftRock, GnuRadio, Perseus, etc. We could take what they learned and move it into the above 30MHz region. They did it, no reason why we couldn't.

Well, I'm suspecting people had just made do with the scanners that they could afford. Who knows. But, I think that all of the previous Mfg's probably looked at at least some of these options, but decided not to because either the market was not ready, cost too high, etc. Of course it would have to be fairly afford it. I wouldn't want it to be too far out of reach for most people.. it would be too

Most of the scanners I have owned in the past 20 - 30 years have been junk when it comes to squelch and quieting.. especially during periods of inactivity. There's a lot of those set it and forget it type people out there too.

As far as antenna connectors go, I wanted people to be able to use just about anything thats out there on the shelf, most of it being BNC.. Me, hate being so limited in choises So, why N connectors?

I'll be the first to say I personally hate all the images, spurs, birdies, etc. I've I haven't set a very precise squelch level with the control, I have always noticed I miss out on a lot, and I think that experience could be bettered somehow.

I carefully considered the option of the connections to a highly stable reference oscillator.

People interested in 10m/11m/CB/SSB CB could roll their own add in cards. Prolly not much interest in scanning down there.. but I would leave that to the individual user.

We'd have to provide adequate sheilding too. Eliminating and or possible filtering of internal/external noise sources. Of course it would also have to be of very good spec too, synth noise and IP3. I don't have the numbers at my disposal, but we need some #'s we can shoot for. Remember this is the R&D phase. I've never been a very big numbers guy.

I thought about starting a blog and/or a yahoo group where we could all work on this.

We could certainly even include a high quality sound card interface for people with laptops and desktops, and even those technos with high end soundcards. The idea is 'something for everyone' here, from the very basic newbie user to the very advanced user. Either way still have a lot of choices to make.

Greg

 

[Hoofy]

Maybe the government mandate to switch to the 700 to 900mhz freqs will solve your problems for you.

How many years before everything but the AM air bands and trunking freqs are not worth listening to because everything has moved.

I think your one scanner does all is good in theory but not practical in use because of the receiver issue.

I think the bottom line for the scanner enthusiast if it came down to one scanner with multiple receivers (which I probably couldn't afford) or multiple scanners that will do the same thing I would go for multiple. More is better and cheaper if you buy one at a time.

 

[firemedic78]

I am glad to see your considering the FIPS but I still think maybe the fire tone out option would be nice. I know myself, I use that alot at night when charging my officer handheld.

 

[Chris54]

Features

I think scanner designs went astray with the implementation of the dual volume/squelch knob. They should be seperated for the more simple and accurate calibration of those features. Simplicity is a big plus, so consider two models. The first being a good work horse for the average Joe that does not have a PhD for making adjustments and programming. Trash Can the "object oriented" garbage. This is very confusing to seasoned scanner users, and a total nightmare to new folks entering the hobby. Banks are banks, frequencies are frequencies, talkgroups are talkgroups. Call them objects if you like, but they are what they are.

 

[davidmc36]

Trash Can the "object oriented" garbage. This is very confusing to seasoned scanner users, and a total nightmare to new folks entering the hobby. Banks are banks, frequencies are frequencies, talkgroups are talkgroups. Call them objects if you like, but they are what they are.

Going away from DMA is a terrible step backwards. Unless you can make 1000 banks with 20 or so channels each. 20 banks with 1000 channels each wastes so much of the scanners memory space, unless you could put more than one trunked system in each bank and I have not seen that yet. That is what DMA took care of.

 

[davidbond21]

Trash Can the "object oriented" garbage. This is very confusing to seasoned scanner users, and a total nightmare to new folks entering the hobby. Banks are banks, frequencies are frequencies, talkgroups are talkgroups. Call them objects if you like, but they are what they are.

All I know is that after learning how to program the RS Pro series scanners by hand, the object oriented "garbage" that my PSR-500 uses scarcely required me to look in the manual to figure out how to do anything. The same cannot be said of the RS scanners when those were all I had. "Seasoned" to me sounds more like stubborn. You learned how to do it one way long ago, and now you feel like you shouldn't have to learn anything new.

And as a comment toward the OP, I think it would be useful if the operation of your device was similar to how you control/program current scanners. This would be helpful for experienced users to pull the device out of the box and get started right away, vs having to learn a new operating system before they can get the scanner to do anything. I guess I'm just thinking in terms of making it user friendly. "Intuitive" is the word I think the GRE marketing uses to describe their object oriented programming, and to an extent it is.

 

[shaft]

Sourceforge would be a better place to run the open source project from.

 

[gmclam]

OOP vs banks

Going away from DMA is a terrible step backwards. Unless you can make 1000 banks with 20 or so channels each. 20 banks with 1000 channels each wastes so much of the scanners memory space, unless you could put more than one trunked system in each bank and I have not seen that yet. That is what DMA took care of.

While I see benefits of each the object oriented type system and the bank type system; my preference would actually be dynamic banks. In other words, banks are not a fixed size, but can be whatever you need them to be. And there should certainly be more than 10; I'd suggest 255.

 

[davidmc36]

While I see benefits of each the object oriented type system and the bank type system; my preference would actually be dynamic banks. In other words, banks are not a fixed size, but can be whatever you need them to be. And there should certainly be more than 10; I'd suggest 255.

That's pretty much what you are doing with the DMA scanners would you not say?
Systems=Banks (They have a limit but it is large)
The new DMA scanners allow quite a few systems. And each system can have a lot of "talkgroups=channels"

 

[gbowne1]

Hi there all,

I spent the better part of the day gathering your ideas. Well, I wouldn't expect that each system have more than 99,999 talkgroups. That's a lot. I didn't look at the exact number, but area has about 5-10% of that. I am not sure why one would want more than 100k or so talkgroups stored in each system bank. But, I perfer the user having room to grow. Each band or user type can have its own bank.. or even sub- bank. I know the concerns of wasted memory.

Well, yes, of course you would have to make it intuitive for beginners and advanced users alike. But, you can also do like some software does, where you can set a basic, intermediate or advanced control in the options field. As the user learns to use the device, he/she can move to the more advanced modes. Of course it would feature very well labeled controls on the front panel. Also, any operating system we design and build will be as well.

So you are all basically saying to use a DMA structured memory? So if we use something like a SD card how is that done?

In most of the scanners I have owned, the squelch control has a wide range between the point where it fully quiets about 95% of the signals (where it picks up most if not all of the active channels unless one or more of the skipped but active channels are quieltly still active such as a distant tx) and the point while turned counterclockwise where it lets go of full quieting again.

Greg