Okay - I give up. I bought a BCD996XT and the ARC-XT software and can't make sense of it. I'm old school and had no problems with the old analog programming...but this new digital is completely mind boggling to me. Does anyone in the Huntsville area know where I might be able to get it programmed if it is possible? I had bought a PSR-800 from Scanner Master right at the changeover and had them program it, but it didn't seem to work, so back it went. I asked them to program a BCD996XT for me, but they said it wouldn't work. I thought I'd give it a try, but maybe it just wasn't meant to be.
Currently I have two Radio Shack Pro-2052 and because of the conversion, I can only listen to AST and the Limestone County Sherriff's channel. HEMSI still broadcasted their traffic over analog after they went digital, but recently turned the analog off.
As far as why the Madison County Fire went digital, I'm not sure, but may have a small lead. Within the past year I was communicating with Ed Blair of the 911 center while he was working with the new system. One night I heard a county fire unit go on the scene of an emergency and the dispatcher told the responders that the key to the trailer was inside a frog ornament on the porch. Usually, the dispatcher would tell the responders to call the 911 center for that info and/or gate lock combinations. I thought this was a compromise of security and mentioned it to Ed. He agreed and took it to management. Management may have agreed that it was wrong and figured it would be better for those rare times that they have sensitive information to encrypt it all instead. Sorry.
ChuckZ
Harvest, AL