BCD436HP/BCD536HP: How to stop scanning USA content

[radioroo]

Sounds like you have Michigan, Ontario and Nationwide in a favorites list. When mine boots I see the list I have created. I rely on using Sentinel for setup and not very good at setup at the radio buttons. If they are in a list as seen in Sentinel it is a right click on the offending item in the list and 'select remove from list'. Then reload to scanner.

No I didn't have any favourites list and the scanner was reset from factory. I just entered my post code and it loads Michigan, Ontario and Nationwide without my choice.

 

[radioroo]

The other thing confusing me is if I avoid "Civil Air - USA" there is no option for "Civil Air - Canada" so what exactly am I avoiding here? All Civil Air? There are lots of services with - USA after them and only a few for Canada. I don't want to avoid USA items if it means I am also avoiding Canadian items.

 

[Jay911]

That's "Civil Air Patrol". There is no Canadian equivalent.

In post #6 I identified all the Canadian nationwide content. You can safely permanently avoid everything else if you don't want to scan/hear any US stuff. You probably will want to avoid some of the ones in post #6 as well (like weather radio, which is a continuous broadcast and would just lock up the scanner).

Are you using a city/postal code for your location settings? If you can give me that, and the range you're using (20 miles I think), I can plug it into a tool I have here and it will tell me what it's trying to receive.

 

[radioroo]

I don't think the favourites list feature is going to work for me. Since I don't know what many of the services are I'm not going to be able to sit for days adding the hundreds of interesting things I might encounter when travelling around Canada, just so that I can avoid the things I don't want the scanner to scan (because it can't pick it up anyway) from the USA.

All I want is to disable the USA items and a some of the other items that I can't pick up. The reason is because it takes far too long to run a scan when it's scanning all these things it can't even pick up.

 

[radioroo]

Where precisely in Canada are you? If you're close to the border, your range settings (20 miles) may be including some American states and counties.

For the nationwide systems, hit Menu, Set Scan Selection, Set Nationwide Systems, and then turn off anything you don't want to hear. Yes, some of them have names which are too long to fit, but that's how things work. Here are the ones which are Canadian:

Amateur Radio - CAN
Environment Canada (this is Weatheradio)
General Public Use
Interop - CAN
Marine Channels -
Rail - CAN

Actually, when you get into that menu, if you've set your location up to be in Canada, the American ones are marked with dashes instead of "On" or "Off". They can't be selected, they're already turned off.

If you are close to the border, as I said in the top of this post, let me know precisely where, and I can probably help you fine-tune it to avoid the US data.

Thanks Jay. Some really good guys here.

In the "Select Nationwide system" menu I'm able to turn on or off all sorts of USA items. There are none marked with dashes. I think this is because my scanner is loading up Michigan at startup as well as Ontario and Nationwide. I'm about an hour from the border. I'm not able to pick up anything from Michigan otherwise I wouldn't mind it scanning that area.

I really appreciate the help here Jay, thank you.

 

[radioroo]

That's "Civil Air Patrol". There is no Canadian equivalent.

In post #6 I identified all the Canadian nationwide content. You can safely permanently avoid everything else if you don't want to scan/hear any US stuff. You probably will want to avoid some of the ones in post #6 as well (like weather radio, which is a continuous broadcast and would just lock up the scanner).

Are you using a city/postal code for your location settings? If you can give me that, and the range you're using (20 miles I think), I can plug it into a tool I have here and it will tell me what it's trying to receive.

Thanks Jay, I'm going to PM you this info.

 

[Jay911]

Thanks Jay. Some really good guys here.

In the "Select Nationwide system" menu I'm able to turn on or off all sorts of USA items. There are none marked with dashes. I think this is because my scanner is loading up Michigan at startup as well as Ontario and Nationwide. I'm about an hour from the border. I'm not able to pick up anything from Michigan otherwise I wouldn't mind it scanning that area.

I really appreciate the help here Jay, thank you.

Perhaps it's because I'm ~300km from the US border here in Calgary, and you're much closer than that. The scanner is smart enough to know that I haven't a hope in heck of ever hearing American signals, while you probably do have a chance one way or another.

Reducing your range from 20 miles to something smaller is probably your best bet at this point. That doesn't mean you want to hear things from 20 miles around you, that means you want to hear things that can be heard up to 20 miles around you. That's not the same thing. Each entity in the database has a range circle too, and your goal is to make their circle and your circle overlap. You might want to try backing it off to 15 miles and see if you still get what you want to hear . If that's true, and you're still getting American stuff loaded, back down again to 10 (or 12.5 or whatever), and repeat until you are getting what you want to hear and as little as possible of the American stuff. Then you will have to lock out (avoid) the remaining American stuff.

 

[Jay911]

Thank Jay, I'm going to PM you this info.

I'll work with it and see what I come up with, and get back to you by PM. Thanks.

 

[radioroo]

I just want to say that Jay helped me via PM and I now know how to avoid unwanted departments and USA content despite being close to the border. Much thanks to Jay for his detailed and expert advice!