Newbie questions re: Franklin area scanning

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Longshanks

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Aug 6, 2017
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Hi all,
After spending a few days reading this forum and doing searches I decided I need to ask some direct questions before pulling the trigger on a scanner. I am a TOTAL newbie, although I'm pretty confident that I can learn the necessary skills to program a scanner if I don't go the plug and play route, although I'm leaning heavily in that direction. The scanners I'm interested in are: Homepatrol 1 or 2, BCD436HP, or if I go for a more traditional scanner, the BCD996P2.

First, I'm primarily interested in listening to Franklin PD. I haven't really given much thought to what else I'd listen to but I'm sure I'll find other stuff that's just as interesting. Has anyone heard if Franklin is moving to phase 2 in the near future? If so I'll rule out the scanners that can't do phase 2. From the above list, do any jump out as perfect for listening to Franklin or as horrible choices?

Second, as of now I only own Macs. I know if I buy the 996P2 I basically have to either buy a windows laptop or use bootcamp on one of my Macs. They're old & cranky though so I'm leaning towards reserving some of my budget for an inexpensive windows laptop, but I'm wondering if I decide on the HP1 or 2, or the 436HP if this would even be necessary? It would definitely point me in this direction if I had no need to ever update the firmware or connect to a laptop for some other reason, but is that realistic?

Thanks for any help, cheers!
 

W5RGP

Member
Joined
Mar 10, 2013
Messages
616
Location
Charlotte Tn
Hi all,

After spending a few days reading this forum and doing searches I decided I need to ask some direct questions before pulling the trigger on a scanner. I am a TOTAL newbie, although I'm pretty confident that I can learn the necessary skills to program a scanner if I don't go the plug and play route, although I'm leaning heavily in that direction. The scanners I'm interested in are: Homepatrol 1 or 2, BCD436HP, or if I go for a more traditional scanner, the BCD996P2.



First, I'm primarily interested in listening to Franklin PD. I haven't really given much thought to what else I'd listen to but I'm sure I'll find other stuff that's just as interesting. Has anyone heard if Franklin is moving to phase 2 in the near future? If so I'll rule out the scanners that can't do phase 2. From the above list, do any jump out as perfect for listening to Franklin or as horrible choices?



Second, as of now I only own Macs. I know if I buy the 996P2 I basically have to either buy a windows laptop or use bootcamp on one of my Macs. They're old & cranky though so I'm leaning towards reserving some of my budget for an inexpensive windows laptop, but I'm wondering if I decide on the HP1 or 2, or the 436HP if this would even be necessary? It would definitely point me in this direction if I had no need to ever update the firmware or connect to a laptop for some other reason, but is that realistic?



Thanks for any help, cheers!



I'm a Mac user myself and sentinel runs just fine on Mac using a program called crossover if you go the 536hp route



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

kg4ere

Member
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Apr 4, 2009
Messages
81
Location
Tennessee
Franklin and Williamson County are in the process of building out a County wide 700/800 radio system. The plan is to use the backbone already in place with Franklin's system and expand it to encompass all County agencies. The "new" system will have redundancies with Metro's system so that we can fall back on them in the event of a failure and visa versa.

There are currently no plans to buy all new radios for Franklin departments, just codeplug upgrades. I do not know if the new portion of the Franklin system will stay Type 1 or upgrade to 2. Type 2 is backwards compatible so the new portion of the system could very well be Type 2.

Honestly I would bite the bullet and go ahead and get a scanner that will cover both types. It will eventually be consuming more and more legacy systems. I use the HP1 right now to monitor Franklin police and fire and it does fine.
 
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