Freescan Feature: "Automatic Scanner Optimizer" What's YOUR Opinion/Experience??

[SuperCraig]

Freescan Feature: "Automatic Scanner Optimizer" What's YOUR Opinion/Experience??

Hello, a newbie here who is researching software for my new BCD396XT. I believe that ProScan and Freescan are the only two software products out there supporting this unit at this point.

I posted a different thread asking about user's opinions about these two, and will hopefully get some good comparisons, but I'm concerned that some might not see (or respond to) this very specific part of my question:

If you've used the "Automatic Scanner Optimizer" can you please give me your impression of it? Did it work great, poorly, somewhere in between? As a newbie, this feature sounds great- AND I want to know if it's just a marketing gimmick or a useful tool.

Thanks for offering your opinion so I may make an educated choice.

Thanks!

 

[ka3jjz]

As FreeScan is freeware, it's a bit of a stretch to think of it as 'marketing'. To me, it's a bit of a gimmick - it's Assaf's interpretation of an optimized scanner. I might go along with the hold times evaluation (although setting the hold time on a trunk system at 2 seconds is a little much with a busy system) and finding freqs and talkgroups with zeros might be useful, the others are too subjective for my tastes. After all, you might build a group of frequencies that aren't in sorted order for a good reason (for example, listening to a LTR Multinet system - which cannot be tracked, and the freqs could be in a random order)

73 Mike

 

[SuperCraig]

Thanks for your input, that's the kind of thing I was looking for. Sounds like it might be an alright thing for a beginner to use until I have a better understanding of all the settings and such.

 

[cpuerror]

Thanks for your input, that's the kind of thing I was looking for. Sounds like it might be an alright thing for a beginner to use until I have a better understanding of all the settings and such.

It is designed to help the scanner scan faster. For example, a lot of people have systems with 5 channels but the hold time is the default 2 seconds, so the scanner wastes a lot of time rescanning the same channels and not moving onto others. That's the kind of thing this feature is designed to address.

The automatic frequency sorting can make your scanner scan faster if you have a lot of conventional channels. I use it myself, some people have a specific order they want their channels in and don't use it. But it is designed to help speed up scanning without having to go through every single group you may have and sort manually.

 

[jnewell]

Here's another point. I recently took a look at the invalid freqs/TGIDs using the optimizer. Turns out there were a pile of invalid TGIDs in several different sections of the RR database. I could have found them manually, of course, but hadn't gone looking for them. The optimizer pointed them out very efficiently and effectively. I may be mistaken, but I don't think any other software package for GRE or Uniden has this feature?