SDS100/SDS200: New SDS200 Receiving Bites.

[ratboy]

The first time I lost everything on my PSR-500, it really made me glad that I had backed it up with Win500 a day earlier. To this day, I have no idea why it lost it all, but 15 seconds on the PC, all was well, and I don't think I've lost anything on it since. My SDS200's card died recently, and luckily I had another one ready to go, as I have two SDS200's. Right now I'm listening to UHF med comms on both my PSR500 and my at work SDS200. Guess which one is better? GRE for the win, it's not even close.

 

[HiddenLefty]

The first time I lost everything on my PSR-500, it really made me glad that I had backed it up with Win500 a day earlier. To this day, I have no idea why it lost it all, but 15 seconds on the PC, all was well, and I don't think I've lost anything on it since. My SDS200's card died recently, and luckily I had another one ready to go, as I have two SDS200's. Right now I'm listening to UHF med comms on both my PSR500 and my at work SDS200. Guess which one is better? GRE for the win, it's not even close.

I'm unfortunately disappointed in the slow scanning and completely missed transmissions at times on this scanner. I've literally done everything that could improve it and largely had to revert changes every time because it somehow made it worse, and I am unconvinced it's defective when other people reported the same problem. It's not user error either I assure you. I am having to replace my card now because it seems to have gone south. I have it all backed up, just need to copy it to another one and go. There is a lot this scanner does well but there are serious and glaring issues they keep trying to blame on the user or a failing card when it is clearly something wrong with how they're handling something in the software side making it slow.

 

[ratboy]

I thought the SDS200 was very slow at first, it was just scanning an absolute ton of duplicate freqs and stuff I didn't want. Now that I've deleted all the stuff I didn't want, it takes about 25 seconds to go through MARCS-IP, MSPCS, Lucas, and Wood county and some other stuff. I can probably count on one hand the times a railband signal has ever broken the squelch, so adios to Rail, aircraft is not quite so bad, but the Bearcat 125 is talking away with air and train comms, while the SDS200 moves on. I just put the whole categories on avoid, and am going to delete them both to gain more speed. The VHF HI deafness is pretty much total, it has to be really close, or super strong to hear it.

 

[HiddenLefty]

I can scan one system and site and it's still too slow to catch the first end of a transmission by several seconds. I can definitely hear weaker signals fine too once they get caught at about 5 seconds in so I know it's the software of the scanner doing this. No amount of user modifications on my end will fix it when it's still happening and you've removed all but one thing from the scanning at all. It's not too many things by far causing it. Their decode is too slow or not picking up voice channels until late when it comes to anything digital. Even adjusting the hold time just makes it miss more actually.

 

[ratboy]

I can scan one system and site and it's still too slow to catch the first end of a transmission by several seconds. I can definitely hear weaker signals fine too once they get caught at about 5 seconds in so I know it's the software of the scanner doing this. No amount of user modifications on my end will fix it when it's still happening and you've removed all but one thing from the scanning at all. It's not too many things by far causing it. Their decode is too slow or not picking up voice channels until late when it comes to anything digital. Even adjusting the hold time just makes it miss more actually.

Might be a dopey question, but are you setting the mode to auto? My radios are set to the mode used and there seems to be no problem with delay . When it hits an active transmission, the audio is pretty much instantaneous. My complaints are with the lack of AVC and them being almost totally deaf on VHF-HI and airband. I rarely hear anything. The junkiest old scanner I have worked 10X better on VHF to the point I removed the rail stuff and almost all VHF frequencies from the list.

 

[radioman2008]

consider getting a high quality SD card, one designed for Security camera and car camera use.

I have almost 10 436/536/SDS100 units and put these in all of them. I buy from B&H so i know they arent fake cards.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1375051-REG/sandisk_sdsqxaf_032g_gn6ma_extreme_microsd_32gb.html

 

[Ubbe]

It's reading the SD card first when it hits a channel and starts to decode and then retrieves all the rest of the channel data from the SD card. It is the initial scan stop and decoding that are not happening.

If the scanner are set to do DND priority to a lot of channels then you don't see it do that, it's just not responding while it is checking those prio channels.

If reception are compromised by any interference it can suppress the signal being received and the squelch doesn't open. It's first when a squelch detect have been done that the scanner starts its decode process.

If a debug log are done it will show in that log how it scans, if it skips active channels or a stuck on another frequency. In the beginning the scanner had a scan rate of 85ch/s but some sort of bug lowered it to 45ch/s. Maybe they have tried to fix that but instead introduced another bug that it skips channels in a specific scenario.

/Ubbe

 

[hosehead88]

consider getting a high quality SD card, one designed for Security camera and car camera use.

I have almost 10 436/536/SDS100 units and put these in all of them. I buy from B&H so i know they arent fake cards.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1375051-REG/sandisk_sdsqxaf_032g_gn6ma_extreme_microsd_32gb.html

Is there a max size card that the 200 will take?

 

[fxdscon]

Is there a max size card that the 200 will take?

32 GB is the largest card supported by Uniden. Some folks have reportedly used larger sizes with no issues.

From the SDS200 owner's manual......

microSD card (provided - 1 GB up to 32 GB supported)

 

[hiegtx]

Is there a max size card that the 200 will take?

I've seen several comments about 64gb cards being used, and, one stated that a 128gb was being used.

 

[crippledchicken]

Has anyone used one of these? I thought about getting one for my sds200. Thanks! Amazon Sign-In

 

[HiddenLefty]

Might be a dopey question, but are you setting the mode to auto? My radios are set to the mode used and there seems to be no problem with delay . When it hits an active transmission, the audio is pretty much instantaneous. My complaints are with the lack of AVC and them being almost totally deaf on VHF-HI and airband. I rarely hear anything. The junkiest old scanner I have worked 10X better on VHF to the point I removed the rail stuff and almost all VHF frequencies from the list.

Nothing set to auto that I have programmed in. I actually have excellent VHF and airband reception. There are better air radios sure, and I have a couple, but I haven't had any complaints for what I've tried to hear when it's been what I had in hand. I found any setting of "auto" in this thing makes it slower so basically nothing needs to be set to that regardless of the setting.

 

[ratboy]

Mine does a decent job on 400MHZ on up, but it's just a pretty paperweight on rail and air. I took all that stuff out when I did the firmware update, just to stop wasting the scan time going over what it never hears anyway. Any of my other scanners and HT's with just a junk rubber duck on them are talking away, but the SDS200 sits there, even with a better antenna(s), so I just deleted all the train and air stuff. Strange how you have a delay. Seems like some people do have one, some don't. Watching it right now, it's instant audio as soon as it hits anything.