Just use your URC remote to control your $600 super computer configured for scanning.Problem solved lol!
Easier to use scanner?
- Thread starter Machria
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Just use your URC remote to control your $600 super computer configured for scanning.Problem solved lol!
I know very well how to do that, and have. But lets just take your example, Smithtown. Smithtown has more services and freq's than probably 40 to 45 STATES. Smithtown has something like 1.5 million people in it, 20 or 30 towns/villages, all with their own PD, Fire, an Airport (also with it's own PD, fire, ems, ...), town, businesses, schools, 2 or 3 universities, ..... your get the drift. I don't want to turn on "Smithtown". I want to go to the XYZ village within Smithtown, and listen to their highway dept for example during a snow storm. Or tune in to the Car to car town freq of XYZ village in smithtown when something local is going on.' Smithtown is just one dumb example. I have 1000's of towns on LI in my scanner, each with 100's of services... I've tried arranging them in every way possible, geo, type, local, importance.... there is just no way to do it where you can easily find anything without the computer on. I should also add, I don't listen daily, weekly or even monthly. I pop the scanner on once every few MONTHS or so when something is going on. So part of the problem is remembering months later how the heck it was all configured is impossible. I should not have to.
Sure, it's easy to turn on/off Smithtown, or any other large "Group" and scan it. But that ios not what I'm looking to do. I simply want to go to a SPECIFIC freq or talkgroup, one frequency or talkgroup, and listen to that one. There is absolutely no easy way to do that on this scanner, hands down, PERIOD.
Now don't say "sure you can, just make a quick key for it". But what about the other 5000 freq's? Should I have 5000 "quick keys"? to find each and every freq I might want to go directly to one day?
Would it not make sense to just click MENU, TEXT SEARCH, BY NAME, and enter in "XYZ" and get a list of all tags starting with "XYZ". I can then scroll down the list and hit enter on the one I want to listen to? Is that so difficult?
You guys can defend Uniden all you want. Ha ha ha, makes jokes, very funny. "Machria is an idiot and doesn't know what he is doing". But the reality is, I was a software engineer for 15 years, a Directory of IT for a billion dollar company for 23 years. I do know a bit about technology, and how to develop a product to be user friendly. The Uniden and other brand modern day scanners are OBSURD! And the really sad thing is they know it, you know it, and I know it. So the faster you agree in public about it/admit to it, the faster the will actually do something about it.
Right now, my BCD 396xt is basically a paper weight for about 90% of the people that purchase it. That's pretty sad.
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No personal offense, but that has to be the dumbest post I've ever read on the internet. And that says ALOT.
1st, if your manually entering contacts into your iPhone, you aught to put down the iPhone AND the scanner and also step away from the computer. Find another activity to do.
2nd, the iPhone doesn't "scan" your contacts? Really? Do me a favor, go to the Home screen, then slide your finger from the top of the screen down, a search box comes up. Now type "Bob" and tell me what you see?
You will see ANYTHING on your phone that has the letter "Bob" in it. Contacts, emails, websites, Songs, video's,web links, Notes, apps, internet news articles.... Your probably never thought of this, but your iPhone just used RADIO packet service to a cell tower to get on the internet, google search "Bob", find all the top relevant articles that come up, download a snipit of text and link of each, and present all of this to you on your little 3" LCD display. Clicking one of those links, goes back to the transceiver/RADIO service of the phone and surfs the internet with massive amounts of data and code running.....
So your right, the iPhone didn't "just scan your contacts", it used a TRANSCIEVER for two way communications to a cell tower to communicate to the internet as well as "scan" thru 64 GIGABYTES of data stored in the dynamic memory on the phone. And it did all this while playing music, playing video, and updating 10 other applications in the background.
All the while, the Uniden scanner can't do a simple Text search of a few thousand records of data in it's memory.
Things that make you say "hmmmmmmm".
<Adam Savage>
Well, there's your problem!
</Adam Savage>
If you only use the scanner every few months, the odds of you remembering whether the conversation you want to monitor is on Smithtown Fire Dispatch 2 or Smithtown Fire Tac 5 are close to zero, so a text search, while it would be nice, isn't going to help much. And I'm calling BS on the notion you have "1000's of towns on LI" (shouldn't that be FLs/Favorite Lists?) in your scanner that you can actually hear. Unless this is some creative hyperbole, you're clogging up your scanlist with a bunch of crap you can't possibly hear, which is going to bog down your scanner horribly, and make it much harder to jump to any particular thing of interest. You should seriously consider pruning your favorite lists down to what you can actually hear.
Text search is also going to require adding a full QWERTY keyboard to the scanner, instead of just the numeric keypad. Unless you think twiddling the scroll knob to select letters is user-friendly. So in the absence of a QWERTY keyboard on the scanner, (which would require a lot more space unless you make the keys unusably tiny) a text search function is pointless.
Your claim would be a lot more believable if you appeared to know the difference between a director and a directory, and exhibited a better grasp of spelling and punctuation.
LOL any product that was completely unusable for 90% of purchasers would not remain on the market for long, and would quickly bury the manufacturer and seller in fraud litigation.
You are criticizing a scanner that is 8 years old, one that is not even in production any longer. The newest crop of scanners are quite different, and the interface for them has evolved significantly since the 396. It's not fair to critique Uniden (and Whistler let's not forget) based on that model alone. Also most people that use scanners use them daily, so we are familiar with where things are located due to regular practice, and because we put them there. The other thing is, are you really interested in things like businesses, schools, and universities? Maybe you are. But if not, why gum up your radio with Tow Truck frequencies two counties away? Part of programming effectively is paring your entries down to only what you want to hear, and nothing you don't. Once that's done it's easy enough to print out a list of what's in your radio, and where it is located, what Quick Keys are assigned to it, etc.
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Station51
Member
HP2
I agree. Very user friendly and free software..
You can update your database every week from radio reference
Only thing lacking on this radio in my opinion is the audio..
BUT, GREAT sensitivity,
I snap mine in a mobile bracket and right now I have it sitting here on my desk.Very portable.
I agree. Very user friendly and free software..
You can update your database every week from radio reference
Only thing lacking on this radio in my opinion is the audio..
BUT, GREAT sensitivity,
I snap mine in a mobile bracket and right now I have it sitting here on my desk.Very portable.
Interesting. So why does Wikipedia list Smithtown as having a total population of 117,801?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithtown,_New_York
Hard to feature that as having more frequencies and services than 40 to 45 STATES. The least populated state in the US is Wyoming, with a population of about 585,000.
Just sayin'.
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Nice try, but that is the Village of Smithtown, not the Township os Smithtown. Likewise I live in the village of Brookhaven (my mailing address), which is also located in the "township" of Brookhaven. My village is very small, couple hundred houses. Brookhaven town has close to a million people in it.
You know, you guys can change the subject all you want, but the reality is I'm right. How about stick to the PROBLEM at hand, instead of attacking me personally. Don't shoot the messenger.
How about this, if you think this is not a problem, backup your scanner memory using freescan or other, and then reload using radioreference for ALL of suffolk County, NY both conventional and and the Suffolk and Huntington Motorola system. THEN, try to find a specific talk group to listen to. LOL
And you obviously work for Uniden and are embarrased, and you should be.
Lets get something straight guys!! I'm NOT criticising the BCd396, or just uniden for that matter, orany brand.... I'm instead BEGGING for somebody in the industry to make a MODERNIZED scanner, one that has caught up to the 21st century!! One that you can simply do a text search on, WHY in gods name is that at issue? What is wrong with that??? Should we all just sit back and let technology go BACKWARDS???
First, the quarty kbd argument is invalid. I'm replying from the cafe in a hospital, on my iPhone. Last I checked, there is no "kbd" on my iphone, yet I'm able to type entire paragraphs. (Whick explains the typos .....). And yes, I cant spell or write properly, thats exactly why I'm in IT for almost 40 years now. But of course that has nothing to do with the problem here, but nice try.
Asfor 90% not using the scanner, I stand by that statement and can back it up withfacts. I recently attended a local HAM radio club meeting I was asked to speak at to discuss technology. One of the things that came up was ergonomics of some of the radios. The scanner issue was fresh in my mind, so i possed the question to the group of 23 people who has a scanner, do they use it, and if not why. 6 guys in the room had scanners, 5 of them were Uniden bearcat models. 4 of the 5 said they rarely use the scanner because they were too difficult to use. They all discussed it at lenght because they were complaining about some of the mobile ham radios on the market.
Its a small group, sure, but id bet you it is closer to te truth everywhere than not.
It looks like your Townships are the size/population of typical counties. If I were programming a 396 I would assign System QKs by Township instead of county, then Group QKs to cities and towns within each Township. For each town GQK I would include Police and Fire. And I would not bother with things beyond 20 or 25 miles distant, so Huntington, Amityville, and anything west of there does not go in, likewise anything east of Tuckahoe or New Suffolk gets left behind, or put that stuff into SQKs way at the back of the line, like one SQK for all far West Suffolk, one for far East Suffolk. Now you have a much more manegeable set of things to deal with.
Yes an iPhone style interface would be nice, and I'm sure something like that will roll off the assembly lines one day. But in the meantime I'm working with what I have, and enjoying my radios just fine.
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Your iPhone has a touchscreen with a software keyboard, which is even more complex, annoying, and and expensive than a keyboard with buttons.
And your sample size (5) re Uniden usability is far too small to be statistically meaningful. I'd venture that Uniden's sales and return figures paint a far different picture,, or they would have discontinued scanners years ago.
Also, your're generalizing your experience with the user interface of a discontinued 8-year-old scanner to current scanners, which work differently.
I've done most of that, minus omitting the distant towns, cities.... I often travel to them both via truck and by boat where i stay there for a week (east end of LI for example on boat). So I do want/need them. I havent even mentioned all the other stuff im interested in, 3 major airports, marine traffic, marine pd, Fire Island and all its towns and villages... The scanner can hold 10's of thousands of freqs and talkgroups, we should be able to use them, easily find them. As is, its really not possible.
I should reiterate, I'm ok with "scanning". I can easily scan my local area, local FD, local PD dept, local EMS. Thats not the problem. The problem is finding a single freq/talkgroup when required. A few weeks ago a small plane crashed on the North shore of LI into the water. I knew i had the town and local village and ems... programmed, but i was unable to find them scrolling around my 5000 freqs... I finally fired up my Laptop to see where i put them.... but that is a bit rediculous, no? It would make life sooooo easy if you could just do a quick text search!
blue5011
Member
If you think a 396XT and Freescan are difficult to work with, then you should try a Radio Shack/ GRE scanner.
And don't even think a HP-1 and Sentinel software, another nightmare.
Anyway, sometimes the simplest thing to do is to change from ID Scan to ID Search. That way if it's happening near you, you should be able to listen and determine the TG, irregardless as to whether you have it programmed in or not.
Good luck!
And don't even think a HP-1 and Sentinel software, another nightmare.
Anyway, sometimes the simplest thing to do is to change from ID Scan to ID Search. That way if it's happening near you, you should be able to listen and determine the TG, irregardless as to whether you have it programmed in or not.
Good luck!
The current generation of scanners elegantly solve this problem with Location Control and GPS. When you're traveling around, the scanner automatically turns things on and off so you're always listening to local traffic.You can adjust how far out you listen with the Range setting in the scanner. You don't have to manually search for a town name, just connect a GPS or type in the ZIP code, and the scanner will scan it automatically, even if the channel entries don't reference the name of the town (which would defeat your proposed text search function).
What you're asking for is dumber than what current scanners already do.
To the contrary, if you re-read the above I stated I think programming the 396xt with Freescan is very easy. Throw in a radioreference connection / downloads, and it's even easier. That is NOT the problem.
For the 87th time, the problem is simply FINDING A SINGLE FREQUENCY OR TALKGROUP you wish to listen to at a particular time. You have 5 or 10,000 things programmed into your scanner, so now how do you find them all when looking for them? The answer is, you can't!
As is, I'm better off printing all my frequencies in alphabetically order, buying a good / simple shortwave receiver that covers the bands I need, and when something happens, just look up on PAPER what freq I want, pop it into the scanner, and tune in and listen. Pretty ridiculous.
That again does NOT solve my problem. I do not want to scan anything. I want to tune to, and listen in on ONE (1) particular channel. In addition, the GPS / zip thing in my area does not work very well. Most of the things I listen to are nowhere near me (as far as radio distance is concerned).
I live in the middle of Long Island. Long Island is about 75 miles long, and 10 miles wide. Because of the repeaters all over the island for the Suffolk County system, I am able to listen to pretty much anything on the island in that 75 miles stretch. When something goes on in a particular town I often want to scan that local area which is outside of my normal local area, or sometimes I just want to listen to something specific within that area, like a PD marine dive boat from that village. Sounds easy, but I have 100's of these "area's" in my scanner.
For example, if a plane crashes in the sound or ocean (as happened recently), I want to tune to the PD marine divers unit frequency/TG, of that village. If I scan the entire local area, it will all be busy with all the normal non-sense... I just want to listen to the divers boat in this case. BUT, of course I have no way of easily finding it. I would have to fire up my laptop and look for where I put it and figure out the ridiculous "quick key" I might have assigned to that "grouping" of freq's/TG's, and then click menu and try scrolling thru 100 freq's /TG's and try and find it.
Would be real nice to type "DIVE" and get a list of all Freq's and TG's that had the word DIVE in the tag wouldn't it? I'd get about 10 of them, and simply choose the one from the village in question.
Pretty simple stuff here folks. As a reminder, it is 2017.
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