Fine tuning the 500 for Milair

[737mech]

I have been very impressed with my 500 but some of my favorite freqs on milair and VHF airband never seemed to hit as often as I would like. I already had activity on my bct-15 but the 500 didn't quite seem to open up as often until today, as I am always trying to get the perfect setup I turned on the ATT and opened the squelch way open to the noise gate. Well there it is, now I can hear VHF airband more.
So it poses a weird question, why does this little scanner need ATT and way open squelch as opposed to no ATT and medium to 50% squelch? Having to make this much adjustment to receive different bands seems strange to me. Is this the "FM interference" condition that others have had? Would a FM trap improve my 220-400 Receive?

 

[ka3jjz]

It might improve the rejection of out of band sigs, but there's another possibility. I know of 2 active milair folks that tried the 500 when they first came out, and said it was very insensitive in the UHF milair band. I haven't seen any other reports, though 73 Mike

 

[737mech]

I don't think it's insensitive in my case I live 13 miles from Nellis, AFB. Almost line of sight. If I tune to a particular freq it does fine, however while scanning things change a bit. BTW I also have a bunch of antennas (TV, FM radio etc) atop a mountain 7 miles southeast of me. I have always thought of that as a problem but I am not experiencing any bleed over or over powering signals. I'm just trying to weed out the bad from the good.

 

[FrankJ]

That's why I kept my PRO-43......the PSR-500 doesn't even come close to it for milair sensitivity, intermod rejection, and dynamic range.

Frank

 

[737mech]

Better Milair on 500

I found DonS post on setting the sq mode to ctcss/search not "None" or "Search" and the scanner now gets better for Mil 220-400 comms and aircraft comms. Apparently the scanner looks for digital first then analog unless you set it up not to. I wonder why that wasn't directly addressed in the manual? Setting the scanner to scan analog not digital?

Thanks for the info DonS!!!

 

[KB4REA]

I found DonS post on setting the sq mode to ctcss/search not "None" or "Search" and the scanner now gets better for Mil 220-400 comms and aircraft comms. Apparently the scanner looks for digital first then analog unless you set it up not to. I wonder why that wasn't directly addressed in the manual? Setting the scanner to scan analog not digital?

Thanks for the info DonS!!!

Hmm, my first thoughts were, "wow, a 20-month-old thread is a pretty old thread to be responding to" but I'm glad you did. :wink:

Only having a GRE scanner for the last month (since my Pro-97 years back), I never came across this tip for milair monitoring, which I do a lot of. So thanks again & I'll adjust my programming and see if there's any improvement (tho I'm happy with the sensitivity now).

 

[737mech]

Psr310

I hope this solution works as well for you as me. How's the 310 on Milair? I'm wanting a 410 but not sure yet. My BCT15 and 15x are very good on Milair but I really like the GRE 410 from what I read. Try and see I guess?

 

[darrylcn]

I have a related question - in cases where the scanner finds a tone, are you better off leaving it set to that it uses it, or are we always better to set it to None if there's nobody else using the same frequency?

 

[KB4REA]

Wirelessly posted (BB Bold 9780: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.359 Mobile Safari/534.1+)

I hope this solution works as well for you as me. How's the 310 on Milair? I'm wanting a 410 but not sure yet. My BCT15 and 15x are very good on Milair but I really like the GRE 410 from what I read. Try and see I guess?

I'm a little embarrassed with my earlier post, I didn't realize you were the OP. You're just following up

The 310 seems as good as any scanner I've had on milair. There's usually a lot of local activity with all the air bases around so its not like I'm trying to pull in distant signals. I will say tho that my old 396xt did better on a 380MHz P25 system than my 106 has (while monitoring from inside my vehicle about 6-7 miles away).

Its hard to tell tho if I'm getting more hits because of a new scanner or because of just increased radio activity. Some days you might think the scanner's dead but in reality there's nothing going on, nothing to monitor.

 

[ka3jjz]

I found DonS post on setting the sq mode to ctcss/search not "None" or "Search" and the scanner now gets better for Mil 220-400 comms and aircraft comms. Apparently the scanner looks for digital first then analog unless you set it up not to. I wonder why that wasn't directly addressed in the manual? Setting the scanner to scan analog not digital?

Thanks for the info DonS!!!

This is a tip that belongs in our FAQ; it's liable to come up again...

GRE/RS Object Oriented Scanners FAQ - The RadioReference Wiki

(hint hint)

best regards...Mike

 

[Mojaveflyer]

PSR-500/600 Squelch Settings

I tried the same settings on my PSR-600 and found some improvement but I'm still not real impressed with this radio on Mil Air. It replaced a Uniden 780 that I thought was really hot but died last fall. I'm still playing with the settings to see if I can improve civil & mil-air reception.

I found DonS post on setting the sq mode to ctcss/search not "None" or "Search" and the scanner now gets better for Mil 220-400 comms and aircraft comms. Apparently the scanner looks for digital first then analog unless you set it up not to. I wonder why that wasn't directly addressed in the manual? Setting the scanner to scan analog not digital?

Thanks for the info DonS!!!

 

[N8IAA]

I am presuming that the frequencies are programmed in the AM mode, not the Auto mode. I have great success listening on the 106 while mobile on an external antenna. Had it at the Dobbins Air show last Oct. Listened to the Dobbins base on P-25 and the show. However, my main radio for milcomms is my 163 which does a bang up job.
Larry