Thank you. I’ve already received a PM from another person here. If inhale other questions I willlet you know.
I’m “starting over!”
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- Thread starter ArkTex
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I’m “starting over!”
I appreciate it. I might be 21 but I have nothing close to the programming wizardry some of y’all have.
I’ll get there, but I still have a long way to go.
What is usually the range of an SDS series?
ToddWilkinson
ScanMN
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Price Range or Distance it will receive? depends on height of your antenna, my buddys antennas up 40 feet and hes hitting 60 miles on his sds200!
ToddWilkinson
ScanMN
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I sold mine, bought a 996p2, and just got my 536 and I love it!
I'll be sure to find out when I'm in the Dallas area next week. My G4 can pull in traffic for almost 25 miles on a clear day, so I'm excited to see what my SDS can do.
ToddWilkinson
ScanMN
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Bro honestly its fkin trash, i thought just like you oh this is gonna be sweet, then i get it, first it was sweet, then the humming started, screen issues, speaker is trash id suggest an external speaker!
I thought most/all of those problems were on early units and they fixed all that. Am I wrong? I sure haven't had any problems with any of my SDS units. Granted, I like my 436HPs as well, but I mostly bought those because they use AAs and I wanted to have that capability in emergencies. But they're all nice radios. I haven't had any actual problems with any of them. It just took me some time to figure things out.
it’s like any other piece of electronics. It’s a gamble to buy any expensive tech because it could always be either a lemon or defective. It’s just a dice roll that is the same as everything else.
I'm just saying it's important to note the difference between design problems and instances of bad units. If the scanner is designed with a serious defect (bad choice of parts, for example, or as we saw with the noise issue, improper internal grounding or such), that's a whole lot worse, when looking at a model of scanner deciding whether to buy it, than just noticing that some people here and there have bad units. I think it's totally normal and expected, with any manufacturer of any complex good, that there will be some bad units. I was just saying I think most of the serious design flaws have been addressed, at least of the hardware variety.
Now, I do think Uniden has plenty of work to do on the firmware side. I'm not sure what the holdup there is, but they do supposedly have a large list of things to fix and should be working on those. I imagine many of those will require updated firmware. I can only hope they will eventually release updated firmware to address those, although the pace so far as not been inspiring.
Still, as I said, I continue to consider these some of the very best radios I've ever owned.
Now, I do think Uniden has plenty of work to do on the firmware side. I'm not sure what the holdup there is, but they do supposedly have a large list of things to fix and should be working on those. I imagine many of those will require updated firmware. I can only hope they will eventually release updated firmware to address those, although the pace so far as not been inspiring.
Still, as I said, I continue to consider these some of the very best radios I've ever owned.
The 'cold solder joint' in its many variations on the SDS100, and the 'hum along with your SDS200', were mostly on the earliest production models. Not every unit had these issues, though quite a number did crop up. I have an early production SDS100 as well as an SDS200, and have never had either of those problems. That by no means indicates that I doubt the owners of these models that did have the problem, only that I did not. The cause of those two issues, which linked back to errors or incomplete procedures during the assembly process were pointed out to Joe Bearcat when he stepped in as a replacement to the late (and still missed) UPMan (Paul Opitz). He then referred them back to Uniden, and changes were made in the manufacturing process. Based on the very few complaints on the two issues in the last year or so (after Joe Bearcat noted that these had been address internally at Uniden), I would call them corrected at this point. Most of the recent complaints on these two problems appear to mostly in earlier production, not current ones, where either the problem has only manifested itself recently, even though the problem unit was produced before corrections were introduced.
Uniden did have a repair campaign for the x36HP scanners that was opened October of 2015, and finally at end of September it expired after 5 years. This was for the real time clock on both the 436HP and 536HP. It also included replacement of the display components that were dimming unexpectedly. Even now, occasionally someone will pop up with this issue. Maybe their scanner did not exhibit either problem until recently, or they acquired an older, previous owned, unit that was never sent in. The initial problem was resolved, though some of the units were never sent in while the campaign was open.
Any manufactured electronic or mechanical product you acquire can, at some point, have an issue, Just look at all the variety of recalls for automobiles, whether they be new models, or concerns that pop up on vehicles that were sold a year or more ago. Have people quit buying cars since something could possibly go wrong?
I just realized I have the holy trinity of simulcast performers. A micro P25RX, a G4 and a SDS100.
I’m surprised that the SDS isn’t much bigger than a unication. Y’all gave me the impression this thing was gonna be bulky.
They're really small actually. I think a lot of that impression comes from the shape of the back, where they redesigned the battery so there's that hump. But yeah the SDS100 is very small, not a large radio at all. There's a lot of capability in a very small package.
I found the setting to switch to the detailed screen while scanning and it’s really nice to have, though a bit of an information overload at times. Now I just have to find a use case to run my SDS and unication at the same time.
After some further testing on the Colorado DTRS system from my work in Grand Junction, Colorado this is my new favorite radio. It's picked up transmissions that are crystal clear from San Juan County, Colorado ( a distance of over a hundred miles.) No distortion and I've even managed to get a brief snippet of a Bustang transit bus going into Denver, CO.
I don't know if I got lucky or what, but that's impressive.
I don't know if I got lucky or what, but that's impressive.
Are you hearing a site from over 100 miles away or just TG’s from over 100 miles away that are affiliated to a tower much closer to you?
It's definitely a site. I know for a fact San Juan County SO doesn't affiliate with Mesa County towers, as far as I've had it explained to me by one of my coworkers as far as they know. It might just be I hit it on a good day. I'll see what I can get in the logging.
It most likely was on a closer site, but that's even still impressive.
How many sites are you scanning?
the entire DTRS.
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