BCDx36 Wish: REAL AGC

[rothschp]

I sure miss having a working AGC. The volume varies from barely audible to blast-me-out-of-my-recliner. An external speaker might help, but shouldn't be necessary. With all the digital signal processing going on in the radio, an AGC that works should be a piece of cake. Anyone else?

 

[JD21960]

Real AGC

You're not alone. These new "Ipod" type scanners suffer from that. My Old Pro96 has the best sound at full volume with no clipping and a real AGC. But I need Phase II and TDMA now. My new WS1080 is like the unidens. The Digital signals are great, loud and clear, too loud with the TDMA signals even. I can hear those even in the car. But Conventional signals are woefully low depending on location and distance. If I had a wish, it would be the same thing. A real AudioBoost function and AGC where all "objects" have same volume or you could increase the Conventional ONLY. If I could have the Pro96 audio prowess in the WS1080 it would be perfect. Speaking of external speakers, I have an old Sports Sync radio from scanner master as an external while at home hooked up to the WS1080. Helps a lot.

 

[Boatanchor]

I sure miss having a working AGC. The volume varies from barely audible to blast-me-out-of-my-recliner. An external speaker might help, but shouldn't be necessary. With all the digital signal processing going on in the radio, an AGC that works should be a piece of cake. Anyone else?

Fact is that as far as analogue audio is concerned, there is no DSP going on. The analogue audio, in all of todays scanners, comes out of the traditional discriminator/detector chip, gets low pass filtered using old school Op amp filters, is then fed straight to the stepped attenuator (volume control)/squelch chip and then on to the audio amp. The analogue audio is not routed anywhere near a DSP and that my freind is why there is no real AGC in any of todays scanners, including the x36HP..

One day, maybe, if scanner manufacturers start adopting DSP for analogue audio filtering/processing, this may change, but I'm not holding my breath on that one as that would add even greater hardware and more importantly software development cost to the end product.

 

[budevans]

A Working Digital AGC is on my wish list

I sure miss having a working AGC. The volume varies from barely audible to blast-me-out-of-my-recliner. An external speaker might help, but shouldn't be necessary. With all the digital signal processing going on in the radio, an AGC that works should be a piece of cake. Anyone else?

I agree with you 100%. The first message I posted on the Uniden forum was about the apparent lack of a working AGC.

I had just setup my new 436 and was scanning several local P25 systems. The scanner was working as I expected, then it landed on a TG with a dispatcher I could barely hear. Next a unit in the field responded to the dispatch that was so loud I had the same reaction as you. I jumped out my chair and reached for the scanner, almost knocking the scanner off of my radio table. The speaker splattered so badly I thought that I had just destroyed my new scanner in its first five minutes of monitoring.

The best part was that my GRE 500 scanner had landed on the same TG at the same time. While there was a difference in the sound levels between the dispatch and the field unit, it was no where near as extreme as the 436.

I did go out and buy an inexpense amplified PC speakers, I think they were about $6 or $7 with tax. Using the external speaker works much better. There's still an overly large range of volume, but if I blow out the PC speaker I can replace it pretty cheaply.

But the point is I shouldn't have to do that. I sincerely hope that Uniden is addressing the AGC issue in it's up coming firmware update.