jrbean1 said:
I am new to the scanning world.On my scanner's led it has sys (system) and grp (group), What does that mean?
Welcome to RR. Here is an online manual that should make some of the programming steps and features more clear. :
http://myweb.cableone.net/marksscanners/246/246.html Basically, at least one system and one group must exist. Your 246 already came with System 0 with all the racing freq, and several groups under system 0 for the race teams. A system is like a folder on your PC. Groups are like sub folders under the system folder. You Could put all your frequencies in the one group, but just as folders help you organize data on your PC, systems do the same thing. One very simple example is to have a
system for your county, and a System for your state. Under the county system, you might have a
groups for Police, Fire, & EMS. Under state, you might have groups for State Police, State forestry, & State Game. Into each group, you enter the
frequencies for those groups The next advantage of this is you can assign
quick keys to each systems and folder, that let you turn on and off these groups of frequencies. Here are a couple of links to help you understand the concept better:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/DMA
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Uniden_DMA_FAQ
http://www.grove-ent.com/SCANNERPROGRAMMING.htm
I strongly recommend you get software. It will help you understand all this, and make the job a lot easier.,
Here is a list of software:
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/BC246T#Supporting_Software My favorite is ARC246 by BuTel. It allows a automatic download of any or all frequencies in your county and state from this site, and sets up trunking TGID's & para's(this is a big help). It is $40, but well worth it. It has a neat virtual control panel that works your scanner from the keyboard., but the best part is that it logs all the information(freq & PL) and lets you see your scanner window in a much larger scale that you can actually see clearly. The logging is great when searching, but it is also handy for normal scanning. Often, I do not look up in time to see what agency was just talking, so I just look at the log. See the the examples on their web site
http://www.butelsoftware.com/ You can download it on a free trial basis to see if you like it.
There are also free programs, such as
FreeSCAN and
BCtool, that do the same thing. Uniden also has free software, called UASD, but it does not download from this site, and does not have any logging and controls. Also, if you have a new PC or lap top, you will need a serial to USB converter from Uniden
http://tinyurl.com/2cqyu4 or Radio Shack:
http://tinyurl.com/2gpbsp . Another source is
http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10311&cs_id=1031104&p_id=2276&seq=1&format=2, for quite a bit less. It is reported to work.
Note: You would need to become a
paid subscriber to this site to get the automatic down loads, but this is also very reasonable($7.5 for 3 months). This can save you countless hours of programming and frustration.
