golftango
Member
hi folks! 73 to the group!~
i think this is my first forum thread i've originated on radio reference although i search in here all the time. and i did try to search these items and wasn't successful.
i've had several of the uniden 'new generation' (?) scanners such as the 396 and 396xt and i run a 996p2 as my base station. i have a bc125 as a portable close call device as i literally wore out my 396xt and haven't found a replacement for it that makes sense.
so i finally 'settled' on the bcd436hp although i'm not at all sold on the 'home patrol' meme. it did have some new tech compared to the portable version of my 996p2. and the 996p2 is, despite me being a comm/computer tech for 45 years, damm near impossible to operate if your memory is going and you want to do anything subtle or advanced. even the simplest operation can be hiding behind 6 levels of menus or take a 'hidden' long press or an unmentioned fn key.
not near my first rodeo with radios and scanners and computers--i've connected more than two dozen over the years through my mac to windows running under vmware, so not much surprises me when i get a new radio in.
but i swear paul optiz hired a team of drunken monkeys to design this thing or else he just mailed it in from aruba. i knew about the power, <cough> anomaly before i purchased, but, having used one of the 396s for 15 years i use maha powerex cells and charger and power isn't an issue. but on this 436, when i plug the radio into my usb port with the power off, i get the message 'illegal voltage'. which imo either means the voltage sensor isn't wide enough or that when the power is off, it's trying to charge. but everyone says that it won't charge this way.
i searched and searched and didn't find anything that applied so i called uniden. what a f_cking mistake that was! i got 3 idiots right in line, #1, #2, and #3. the first one couldn't spell my first name. the second one said that the radio doesn't work on a mac and that no one who'd ever called him had gotten it to work. the 3rd one thought he was jesus christ and gave me a sermon about 'bad language'. well, i left him with some new words and gave up on that clown crew. i hope paul knows how badly they're making him look.
anyway, that's the first item and the workaround seems to be to be sure to always turn the radio on before plugging in the usb cable. but that means that i can't be charging the batteries and that i have to have live batteries before i can plug it in. if that isn't friggin' insanity, i don't know what is.
the second item is to ask if anyone knows of a step-by-step on how i can replace the factory micro-sd card with a 32gb one. it appears that the uniden software was designed by drunk monkeys as well and that it seems to only talk to the card, not the radio. also, what's the deal with the damm things downloading and updating and massaging the entire rref database to the world's slowest sd card every single time i turn it on or off or breathe wrong? does the dammed radio not have any memory of its own? did they completely cheap out? that's gonna get real annoying real quick.
i hardly ever have to return stuff because i do my homework, but i'm saving the box on this one. it's looking like i should have waited one more generation to try to replace my 396xt.
tks, /guy (73 de kg5vt | wqpz784)
[oh, forgot to note that i did get the sentinel software installed and connected the radio and updated sentinel and the firmware and registered the esn in case i want the very pricey dmr update. i think they just went budget everything on this system. the bad part is that, from what i'm reading, if i replace the micro-sd card i'll have to every bit of that over again, is that correct? surely the radio has enough memory to hold its own firmware--if not, that would be a severe logical inconsistency. ]
i think this is my first forum thread i've originated on radio reference although i search in here all the time. and i did try to search these items and wasn't successful.
i've had several of the uniden 'new generation' (?) scanners such as the 396 and 396xt and i run a 996p2 as my base station. i have a bc125 as a portable close call device as i literally wore out my 396xt and haven't found a replacement for it that makes sense.
so i finally 'settled' on the bcd436hp although i'm not at all sold on the 'home patrol' meme. it did have some new tech compared to the portable version of my 996p2. and the 996p2 is, despite me being a comm/computer tech for 45 years, damm near impossible to operate if your memory is going and you want to do anything subtle or advanced. even the simplest operation can be hiding behind 6 levels of menus or take a 'hidden' long press or an unmentioned fn key.
not near my first rodeo with radios and scanners and computers--i've connected more than two dozen over the years through my mac to windows running under vmware, so not much surprises me when i get a new radio in.
but i swear paul optiz hired a team of drunken monkeys to design this thing or else he just mailed it in from aruba. i knew about the power, <cough> anomaly before i purchased, but, having used one of the 396s for 15 years i use maha powerex cells and charger and power isn't an issue. but on this 436, when i plug the radio into my usb port with the power off, i get the message 'illegal voltage'. which imo either means the voltage sensor isn't wide enough or that when the power is off, it's trying to charge. but everyone says that it won't charge this way.
i searched and searched and didn't find anything that applied so i called uniden. what a f_cking mistake that was! i got 3 idiots right in line, #1, #2, and #3. the first one couldn't spell my first name. the second one said that the radio doesn't work on a mac and that no one who'd ever called him had gotten it to work. the 3rd one thought he was jesus christ and gave me a sermon about 'bad language'. well, i left him with some new words and gave up on that clown crew. i hope paul knows how badly they're making him look.
anyway, that's the first item and the workaround seems to be to be sure to always turn the radio on before plugging in the usb cable. but that means that i can't be charging the batteries and that i have to have live batteries before i can plug it in. if that isn't friggin' insanity, i don't know what is.
the second item is to ask if anyone knows of a step-by-step on how i can replace the factory micro-sd card with a 32gb one. it appears that the uniden software was designed by drunk monkeys as well and that it seems to only talk to the card, not the radio. also, what's the deal with the damm things downloading and updating and massaging the entire rref database to the world's slowest sd card every single time i turn it on or off or breathe wrong? does the dammed radio not have any memory of its own? did they completely cheap out? that's gonna get real annoying real quick.
i hardly ever have to return stuff because i do my homework, but i'm saving the box on this one. it's looking like i should have waited one more generation to try to replace my 396xt.
tks, /guy (73 de kg5vt | wqpz784)
[oh, forgot to note that i did get the sentinel software installed and connected the radio and updated sentinel and the firmware and registered the esn in case i want the very pricey dmr update. i think they just went budget everything on this system. the bad part is that, from what i'm reading, if i replace the micro-sd card i'll have to every bit of that over again, is that correct? surely the radio has enough memory to hold its own firmware--if not, that would be a severe logical inconsistency. ]
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