If you have a base of a really good SDR receiver, like in a Icom 8600, then all things are possible to do in software. But the Icom costs $2500 and it has just basic receive functions, and that cost would be too much for scanner users. You can save a lot of production cost using SDR technology, like Uniden did with the SDS series, and copy features and functions from the firmware of their older scanners without doing much more development than handling the DSP code and SDR frequency handling, but then Uniden jacked up the price instead of lowering it as the market for simulcast scanners are what it is, just a single contender in the boxing ring.
Software development are almost a one time thing, and if you have 80% of the code already in place from other products you can then produce thousands and thousands of cheap SDR hardware and the cost for those 20% of software development are spread out to each product and the more you produce the less the software costs that gets added to each product leaving the factory.
It's the same cost saving politics with the new CDN scanners, take the hardware they already have developed and have the factory line built for to produce their other scanners and add a crippled firmware they already have developed in other scanners that are already paid for and only do minor modifications to it. They could sell those CDN scanners at a really low budget price and still make a good profit.
/Ubbe
