Attn: 396 owners from Camden/Burlington/Philadelphia area re: firmware update

[ampulman]

I'd like to hear from (especially) Camden/Burlington Co & Philadelphia area, regarding their success, or lack therof, regarding the firmware update.

Particularly interested in Mot trunked sys (NJSP & others) w/ w/o digital grps. Burlington Co TRS, Philadelphia Police, and non-trunked digital frequencies (local Federal).

Still operating on 1.11.03 and waiting for Upman to chime in before updating.

AM

 

[Skypilot007]

I've done the update to my 396. On the Burlco system its a bit better as far as the digital noise before the transmissions start, the motorboating or machine gunning as others call it. I've heard very short rare bursts of this since updating. The audio clearity is about the same, no real noticeable improvement that I can hear though I think mine might have a blown speaker. If I connect it to an external speaker it sounds fabulous on the digital.

I haven't ventured near Philly yet to test and my base antenna is down at the moment. The convential stuff has always been good for me and it sounds about the same as is NJSP. I haven't tested it on Cherry Hill and Camden city edacs yet but from what I read they have fixed the beeps so I'll update that when I can.

The AGC function works better too. I have both analog and digital AGC on and rarely have to touch the volume.

Now if there was a patch for my 796D's that worked like this I'd be a happy camper.

 

[W2SJW]

My 396 with the latest update has me 100% pleased with Burlington & Bucks counties.

I re-set the AGC tweak back to factory defaults, and raised the P25 delay time to 600ms, and not a single 'motorboat' out of any Moto-II 3600 TRS that I have programmed.

And, Burlington was the worst out of any of them for that!

 

[Skypilot007]

Update for Camden and Cherry Hill edacs systems. I was able to put my antenna up at a decent height with a make shift mount, nothing like it was but I've run it through a stridesburge multicoupler to help things a little. Cherry Hill and Camden are improved. No more beeps during transmissions but very slight beep at the end of transmissions.

Philadelphia sounds good here also, even with a weak signal its decoding about 80% of transmissions. My 796D with the same antenna is lucky if its decoding 40%. The 396 either has better sensitivity or is more capable of decoding weak signals.

I would say it's definetly an over-all improvement and worth doing.