My Pros and Cons for the Home Patrol-1

[kruser]

I sold my PSR-800, I hated the way it worked, and the "ez-Scan", and even though GRE said there wasn't anything wrong with it, it was pretty deaf. I'm keeping my HP-1, even though it went deaf and is presently at Uniden getting fixed. It was only about a month out of warranty, and I had just installed the extreme upgrade, even though I swore I wouldn't for $100. Hopefully it comes back working like it did when it was new. It was a decent radio then.

I agree as my 800 also seemed deaf. I use a Stridsberg multicoupler for 8 radios. I'll setup the same frequencies in a Uniden and a GRE PSr600 and the 800. The Uniden and the PSR600 would both stop and open the squelch on decent signals as they should. The PSR-800 would just keep on scanning.
But if I stopped the 800 on the channel that the Uniden or 600 was receiving, then the 800 would hear the traffic just fine.
It seemed to be related to tone search. If I turn off tone search and either set the correct tone or set the frequency with no tone then the 800 would also stop from scan mode when the 600 and Uniden did.
Because of this, I can't use tone search mode reliably unless I park the 800 on the frequency I wish to determine the tone on.
It also did not matter if it was a DPL or PL tone or a frequency with no tone, the 800 would not stop and open the squelch if it was in tone search mode. I did find that really strong signals did work in tone search mode.
It works fine on digital channels set to a NAC search mode.
It took me a while to figure this out but I suspected all along that I was missing traffic. Only after I setup the three radios with duplicate frequencies did I learn how much I was missing.
I now regret buying the 800 but decided to keep it now that I know how to work around the problem. Plus it does work very well for an 800 MHz P25 simulcast system here. That alone was enough reason for me to keep it. I just use my other radios when needing to search with a tone search also.

 

[t_shuffle]

The only gripe I have about number 1 is that when you do this, the HP-1 does resume scanning but it resumes from the beginning of the same group (or department) so if the channel is still active when it hits it again in a second or two, it will just stop on the same channel again. I've found no way to force the HP-1 to resume from where it stopped without just starting over in the current department again. It should resume from the point you double tap and then move onto the next group instead of rescanning the current group.

If you don't understand, just program in an active channel (like a weather channel) in a fav list and then double tap when it stops on that channel. The HP-1 will resume but it will go right back to the weather channel before it will ever advance into the next group or bank.
It should resume forward from the point you double tapped! As it is now, when you double tap, it will just stay in the same group or bank as long as your channel is still active. No amount of double tapping will make it advance to the next group. The only way is to set a temp or permanent avoid. This can make it very hard to get back to something interesting you just heard seconds earlier if it was in the group before the current one.

I love this radio dearly, and would recommend it to anyone, but there are a few things about it that irritate me to no end. The lack of a Scan button is at the top of that list.

 

[daveharpe]

Since you have to press and hold the power button to turn it off, I think the scan button should be a quick tap of the power button. Quick tap - scan resume, press and hold - power off. That would be awesome.

Fortunately it's mostly a software radio, so it should be easy to fix this in the future...

 

[ratboy]

There always seems to be at least one thing on every radio that makes you say, "What the hell were they thinking?". Either it's the lack of a scan button, or simply making the wrong choice of making you push buttons to raise/lower the volume when there is a knob available! Or my old pet peeve, Uniden's use of battery packs on the old BC100/200XLT and subsequent radios. They seemed to fail often, and at the worst times. After putting up with it, and buying a bunch of replacement nicad cells and complete packs, I decided to never buy another scanner that didn't take AA batteries. That meant I bought a lot of Radio Shack scanners, even though a couple of of them were inferior compared to the Uniden versions.

I haven't hated a radio as much as I hated the PSR-800 in a very long time. Even discounting it's lack of sensitivity versus all my other scanners, it was just plain annoying. Last one I wanted to get rid of as badly was my old AOR1000, with the Regency HX-2000 a close runner up. I had my Pro-43 for like 20 years, I loved it.