CES vs Uniden

Bob1955

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buddrousa- Correct me if I'm wrong but ever since Paul Optiz passed away, it seems like Uniden America Corporation isn't really committed to staying in the scanner business. Nothing new in so many years. It just seemed to end with the development of the SDS100/200 and they quit.
 

buddrousa

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Bob I have just 1 question for you.
What the current line of Uniden Scanners will not do for you?
Just remember NO OTHER COMPANY has come out with a SCANNER or RECEIVER that does what the SDS Series does that includes 1 company that tried a quit midway through the design and testing.
 

eorange

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Irrelevant question. This is not about the past. This is about the future, of which it appears there is none for Uniden and their scanner product line.
 

kb5udf

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Quoting Buddrousa:
What the current line of Uniden Scanners will not do for you?

Answer: Receive 700mhz p25 transmissions consistently when faced with nearby cell towers; in fact, my SDS100, in some locations will not decode at all (my office for example) and this is absolutely not due to poor signal strength. My home is not quite as bad as the office, but you have to find the sweetspot, or the scanner may lose the control channel and go silent. I believe my area was an early (at least earlyish) adopter of cell usage going up to about 768 MHZ and if it is not wrecking havoc with your receivers other than a commercial subscriber unit, hang on, it's probably coming soon.


I haven't fully measured it, but subjectively, if I am near (about 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile) from a freestanding monopole cell tower, limited or no reception, gradually improving with distance.
 

garys

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It appears that they will not receive TIII DMR systems. The SDS series were launched with a lot of expectations for future upgrades. There are a lot of ports that are currently useless on those scanners. UPMan hinted at some of those potential features, but with his passing nothing has happened.

I don't want to be a Gloomy Guess, but it appears that he was the heart and soul of the Uniden scanner division. Joe Bearcat has become "No show Joe" and very little has happened since his appearance a couple of years ago.

I have four different Uniden scanners currently and those the ones I plan to have for the foreseeable future. I hope that something comes down the pike, but I'm not holding my breath at this point.

It would be nice that if nothing else, Uniden releases their source code so that third party developers can see if there is any potential for new firmware. They won't of course, but it would be nice.

Also, as you point out Whistler seems content to sell designs from about 2012 when GRE went belly up. Whistler Wendy seems to be in the Witless Protection Program.

Bob I have just 1 question for you.
What the current line of Uniden Scanners will not do for you?
Just remember NO OTHER COMPANY has come out with a SCANNER or RECEIVER that does what the SDS Series does that includes 1 company that tried a quit midway through the design and testing.
 

werinshades

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Quoting Buddrousa:
What the current line of Uniden Scanners will not do for you?

Answer: Receive 700mhz p25 transmissions consistently when faced with nearby cell towers; in fact, my SDS100, in some locations will not decode at all (my office for example) and this is absolutely not due to poor signal strength. My home is not quite as bad as the office, but you have to find the sweetspot, or the scanner may lose the control channel and go silent. I believe my area was an early (at least earlyish) adopter of cell usage going up to about 768 MHZ and if it is not wrecking havoc with your receivers other than a commercial subscriber unit, hang on, it's probably coming soon.


I haven't fully measured it, but subjectively, if I am near (about 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile) from a freestanding monopole cell tower, limited or no reception, gradually improving with distance.

Something to try if not already done so, set the Attenuator on the 700Mhz. system you're having problems with. In addition, try Wide Invert filter. I have discovered this to be the "magic" for me an any 700Mhz system. A police department near me use a conventional 700 Mhz. P25 frequency, and it was choppy, or not even stopping on active transmissions. By doing what I mentioned, it's loud and clear now.
 

KevinC

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It appears that they will not receive TIII DMR systems. The SDS series were launched with a lot of expectations for future upgrades. There are a lot of ports that are currently useless on those scanners. UPMan hinted at some of those potential features, but with his passing nothing has happened.

I don't want to be a Gloomy Guess, but it appears that he was the heart and soul of the Uniden scanner division. Joe Bearcat has become "No show Joe" and very little has happened since his appearance a couple of years ago.

I have four different Uniden scanners currently and those the ones I plan to have for the foreseeable future. I hope that something comes down the pike, but I'm not holding my breath at this point.

It would be nice that if nothing else, Uniden releases their source code so that third party developers can see if there is any potential for new firmware. They won't of course, but it would be nice.

Also, as you point out Whistler seems content to sell designs from about 2012 when GRE went belly up. Whistler Wendy seems to be in the Witless Protection Program.

Wendy left Whistler a couple of years ago.
 

W5ATX

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Quoting Buddrousa:
What the current line of Uniden Scanners will not do for you?

Answer: Receive 700mhz p25 transmissions consistently when faced with nearby cell towers; in fact, my SDS100, in some locations will not decode at all (my office for example) and this is absolutely not due to poor signal strength. My home is not quite as bad as the office, but you have to find the sweetspot, or the scanner may lose the control channel and go silent. I believe my area was an early (at least earlyish) adopter of cell usage going up to about 768 MHZ and if it is not wrecking havoc with your receivers other than a commercial subscriber unit, hang on, it's probably coming soon.


I haven't fully measured it, but subjectively, if I am near (about 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile) from a freestanding monopole cell tower, limited or no reception, gradually improving with distance.

Interesting. I'm line of sight with a p25 700 mhz site, opensky 900mhz site and 5 cell providers all on the same plot of land. I've owned 4 sds100's and 2 sds200's, 436/536's, radio shack p25 scanners etc and never had an issue. In fact i often use the attenuator and still have 70-80dBm signal with no missed transmissions. I think verizon was 700 on this tower but sold it to at&t? Hoenstly sounds more like an RFI issue or maybe your office is a faraday cage? maybe you have noisy LED lights, or other electronics, servers, cat6 cables carrying video, PoE, etc, maybe the windows are tinted with a metallic film? lots of radiant barrier? there could be other variables here. I remember installing an HF/VHF/UHF rig in some late model vehicles, some were so bad that I ended up removing the radio (Yaesu 857D). I'd borrow another sds100, or 200 and check that signal again.
 

garys

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Nah. It's been 4-5 years since I had a GRE/RS/Whistler scanner so I don't pay much attention to that forum.

Sure, if you want to. But she announced her departure in a thread here, so it’s not like it was a big secret.
 

KipSullivan

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The last thing we want to do is exit the Scanner Category. Paul Opitz was a huge loss and irreplaceable. I've been back six weeks but know how important in my 15 years at Uniden this category is. I will be going to Japan with two new product managers we hired away from Cobra to meet with Engineering Japan on development of new scanners. Be patient and we did not buy the company to do anyhting but capitiaze on categories we ignored far too long.
 

garys

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Thank you for reaching out us, it's a positive sign.

Paul's death was a great loss for the scanner community and more importantly for his family and co workers.

It's good that you've hired new people and it's good that you are looking at new products.

That said, a good number of people feel that the HP and SDS scanners have been orphaned. You no doubt know how to run a company, but I'm going suggest that fixing any of the previously identified firmware and hardware issues on existing products should be Job 1. Job 2 would be updating firmware to receive Tier III DMR.

There are plenty of comments on one of the threads started by Joe Bearcat a couple of years ago. They might be informative.

Note that I am not a spokesman of any kind for anyone but myself.


The last thing we want to do is exit the Scanner Category. Paul Opitz was a huge loss and irreplaceable. I've been back six weeks but know how important in my 15 years at Uniden this category is. I will be going to Japan with two new product managers we hired away from Cobra to meet with Engineering Japan on development of new scanners. Be patient and we did not buy the company to do anyhting but capitiaze on categories we ignored far too long.
 

buddrousa

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No Modern Day receiver is going to work prefect out of the box for every user you need to work with filters to help your own problem.
I run 22 plus Uniden base scanners 1 mile from a 5kw AM Radio Station 1/2 Mile from a Cell Tower 1 mile from a TV Station 1 mile from a 2nd cell site with 8 100 watt UHF Repeaters I have no problems. Put some effort into your site and you cane have a great working site also.
I have to work a little Harder on my Whistler / GRE Scanners for them to work almost as good as my Unidens.
 

ten13

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Be patient and we did not buy the company to do anything but capitalize on categories we ignored far too long.

Without going into detail, just how does Uniden plan to overcome:
  • the highly technical knowledge necessary (compared to other scanners) just to turn the radio on and hear something. Even here, on RR, there are posters all but begging others to "help" them program the radio, or to do all the programming. I took it upon myself (with the help of posts here, and my previous experience over the years) to learn, the best I can, to program the SDS radios, did it for a few friends, but now I'm getting "cold calls" from people I don't even know asking me to program their radios ("So-and-So told me to call you...."). Some of those "cold calls" seem to think that, like the old days, all you have to do is just enter a few frequencies and you're all set. They are very disappointed when I tell them otherwise;
  • the high cost of the radio itself, which will, undoubtedly, go up as the tech increases, with the necessity of having that high tech as different agencies subscribe to different manufacturers;
  • the dreaded "E".
These are all legitimate concerns, especially in big urban areas, like NYC, where there are so many systems in operation.

I wish you, and Uniden, well in your future endeavors, but the above will be very high hurdles to overcome, just for a limited consumer base.
 

buddrousa

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Without going into detail, just how does Uniden plan to overcome:
  • the highly technical knowledge necessary (compared to other scanners) just to turn the radio on and hear something. Even here, on RR, there are posters all but begging others to "help" them program the radio, or to do all the programming. I took it upon myself (with the help of posts here, and my previous experience over the years) to learn, the best I can, to program the SDS radios, did it for a few friends, but now I'm getting "cold calls" from people I don't even know asking me to program their radios ("So-and-So told me to call you...."). Some of those "cold calls" seem to think that, like the old days, all you have to do is just enter a few frequencies and you're all set. They are very disappointed when I tell them otherwise;
  • the high cost of the radio itself, which will, undoubtedly, go up as the tech increases, with the necessity of having that high tech as different agencies subscribe to different manufacturers;
  • the dreaded "E".
These are all legitimate concerns, especially in big urban areas, like NYC, where there are so many systems in operation.

I wish you, and Uniden, well in your future endeavors, but the above will be very high hurdles to overcome, just for a limited consumer base.
Most new user on RR begging for help programming their scanner NEVER READ THE MANUAL OR SEARCHED FOR HELP. They just tried out of the box with not understanding how the device works.
 

jaspence

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There was a published announcement from Whistler Wendy when she left the company. It may have been sent to registered users, as I had sent both my scanners in for the factory update. One was the GRE brand and the other from Radio Shack. Both work well on the MPSCS simulcast system where I live and will hopefully still be going until the big "E" reduces listening to a fond memory.
 

ten13

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Most new user on RR begging for help programming their scanner NEVER READ THE MANUAL OR SEARCHED FOR HELP.

Neither did I, and for the same reason they didn't: it's a bulk of worthless information for the new user.

The manual assumes that, for instance, you already know what the function of the filters are, and only tells you where to find them. That's only one, simple, thing. There are others.
 

PD47JD

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It appears that they will not receive TIII DMR systems. The SDS series were launched with a lot of expectations for future upgrades. There are a lot of ports that are currently useless on those scanners. UPMan hinted at some of those potential features, but with his passing nothing has happened.

I don't want to be a Gloomy Guess, but it appears that he was the heart and soul of the Uniden scanner division. Joe Bearcat has become "No show Joe" and very little has happened since his appearance a couple of years ago.

I have four different Uniden scanners currently and those the ones I plan to have for the foreseeable future. I hope that something comes down the pike, but I'm not holding my breath at this point.

It would be nice that if nothing else, Uniden releases their source code so that third party developers can see if there is any potential for new firmware. They won't of course, but it would be nice.

Also, as you point out Whistler seems content to sell designs from about 2012 when GRE went belly up. Whistler Wendy seems to be in the Witless Protection Program.
Well said !
 
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