Data Skip / on or off?

[b52hbuff]

Just curious what the 'conventional wisdom' is on whether to enable data skip on channels that are voice only? Does it 'hurt'? What are the downsides...

 

[mciupa]

It doesn't hurt to leave it enabled . Have you ever noticed some time that a freq. will have an open carrier for some unknown reason ? I've seen that from time to time and Data Skip will move things along after a few moments.
The downside is that it seems to have no effect in the AIR band. But usually fine tuning your squelch will help things for that band.

 

[WayneH]

I've seen it activate on a certain QCII tone. Otherwise I usually leave it on. I have more issue with noise instead of data (eg., low band freqs). Wish it worked with that.

-Wayne

 

[MacombMonitor]

I never seen data skip work well. More often, it will not skip under the conditions you would like it to. If you have a carrier with any kind of modulation, ie; "data", it will usually not skip it, thinking instead, it is a signal intended to be monitored. A condition where it will skip almost 100% of the time is when you have a dead quiet carrier. This however may be the worse time to skip. Often, during an emergency, when dispatch, or an officer keys up the mic, they may pause due to something they just saw, or heard, then continue on with the important message...of which you may miss because data skip has already moved on!

 

[Voyager]

Just curious what the 'conventional wisdom' is on whether to enable data skip on channels that are voice only? Does it 'hurt'? What are the downsides...

Unless you have a specific need, I would leave it off. Paging tones and long pauses in transmissions can cause a false activation of the data skip feature which results in scan resumming which means missed transmissions.

Joe M.

 

[mciupa]

... so you have a hung jury ... two for and two against. Give it a try both ways .

Are there systems in San Jose that cause you problems ?

 

[DPD1]

I never seen data skip work well. More often, it will not skip under the conditions you would like it to. If you have a carrier with any kind of modulation, ie; "data", it will usually not skip it, thinking instead, it is a signal intended to be monitored. A condition where it will skip almost 100% of the time is when you have a dead quiet carrier. This however may be the worse time to skip. Often, during an emergency, when dispatch, or an officer keys up the mic, they may pause due to something they just saw, or heard, then continue on with the important message...of which you may miss because data skip has already moved on!

Yeah, I personally have found it pretty useless for those reasons. It would be awesome to have some sort of feature that would allow you to block out stray signals that keep triggering the scan to stop on a certain freq... Something where you could push a button when the interfering signal was present, then the radio would sample that signal and ignore it from that point on... Yet still be able to differentiate between that and a normal carrier.

Dave
-DPD Productions - Custom Scanner, MURS, & Ham Antennas-
http://eje.railfan.net/dpdp/

 

[GTO_04]

I thought data skip only worked in search mode. That is unless they changed its function in later model scanners 396, 796, etc.

GTO_04