How I set up my Unication Pager for west central Florida area.

[mitbr]

Bought a second Unication Pager this time a G4 in preparation for Hillsborough County west central Florida's switch to there new system. Hope it isn't encrypted.
If anyone wants to order a Unication now is the time. They are on sale 100 dollars off retail and free shipping. I bought mine from Ray pagers.
So you may be thinking why didn't I order one of the new Unidens?
I already have multiple Unidens that I use for non P25 stuff. I believe one radio to do everything is not a choice for me. I like the form factor of the G4 and G5. It fits in my shirt pocket. It fits in the cup holder of my car.The battery last 10 to 14 hours on one charge and the volume is loud. I can hear the audio in the car even with the windows down in the car.

I am in Pinellas County here, and no matter where I am in the County the reception is rock solid. I can lock on data channels up to 40 miles away in some cases with the tiny stubby antenna.

With creative programming this pager functions quite well as a scanner.
I set up Pinellas Counties system like this....

Knob position 1 Pinellas County all PCSO Fire dispatch and echo, PPD,SPPD,LargoPD
position 2 PCSO disp only
position 3 PCSO tac talk groups, LE channels,ISSI tacs
position 4 Largo and PPPD
position 5 SPPD
postion 6 PCFD disp and 1 echo now this one is interesting. 1echo is used for tac ground structure fire calls. I have the pager set on this knob position to FD disp priority.
Unlike most of the scanners I have, this mode on the Unication overrides the structure fire tac even if its active. This is nice so I don't miss any dispatch calls.
position 7 PCFD all tac channels
position 8 Clearwater PD

As you can see the only thing you have to do is manually switch between the knob positions to hear what you want. I have the pager set up with voice prompts. When I switch from knob position 1 to knob position 7 it will verbally tell me Pinellas County Fire department tactical.This is user selectable. Very nice when driving in the car you don't have take your eyes off the road.

The above 8 knob positions are in zone 1. You select the zones in the pagers menu.
Lets say I want to monitor one tac channel, in zone 2 I set up each knob position for each talk group. This allows me to focus on one talk group.

I have other zones set up for other counties and when I travel.
By setting up your area properly you really don't need delay or lockout.
I found it works just fine without it although having it would be nice ARE YOU LISTENING UNICATION!!!

Anyway that's my setup. By showing you how I setup my Unication hopefully it will give others an idea of how it can be used as a scanner and of course to give others in my area an idea of how they might set up theirs.

If you have any questions feel free to ask me...always willing to help.
Tim

 

[gcopter1]

I found it works just fine without it although having it would be nice ARE YOU LISTENING UNICATION!!!

Glad it's working out for you, but, I went thru 3, count them 3 Unication pagers, attempting to make them work like a scanner until the Uniden SDS100 came out.
The only improvement I've seen from them all this time, has been the addition of the encryption skip.

My opinion is based solely from a scanner user point of view and, yes, I'm a veteran of the forum wars of those that wanted Unication to turn the pager into a scanner or at least something akin to a scanner.

"We" lost that war and accepted the fact that it would highly unlikely that Unication would please us.

I accepted that and got my SDS100.

Not looking back...

 

[Bote]

I'm never buying another scanner. Nor a Unication. From now on it's the brave new world of SDR for me. Cheaper, too.

 

[KI4VBR]

I'm never buying another scanner. Nor a Unication. From now on it's the brave new world of SDR for me. Cheaper, too.

Care to elaborate some? What does your configuration (H/W & S/W) look like? What was your learning curve like? I am thinking of going that direction too. I have been operating SDR on HF ham radio for 5 years now and not looking back... but things seems a lot easier on the HF side. I am sure there are others interested in your reply as well.

Thanks,
Vince

 

[Bote]

Care to elaborate some? What does your configuration (H/W & S/W) look like? What was your learning curve like?

That's a huge topic that goes beyond the scope of this thread, but for the local Fort Lauderdale and Broward County public safety trunked systems I just run those metal RTL-SDR $20 dongles which is fine for receiving the repeaters. I haven't played with Unitrunker for a couple years, but apparently that has improved by leaps and bounds. You can park one dongle on the control channel and one or more dongles can be steered to voice channels so you'll never miss an important call. Once I finish my major computer systems upgrade here I'll install the newest version and play with it again. I saw a guy tweet a photo of his touch screen SDR "scanner" that he built himself so I'm not alone.

For my railroad feeds I'm using the AirSpy R2 which has much better sensitivity and dynamic range than the RTL dongles. I use SDR-Console as the radio for those and it works out well. The cool part about this is that you can fire up multiple VFOs inside the one program so there's no need for scanning, you just hear whatever is talking as it happens.

Although I am a licensed ham radio operator I just have lost interest in transmitting so I have no information about that side of SDR.