Official BR330T Discussion Thread

[Dubbin]

with an MSRP of $429.

What will it really sell for in the store? The MSRP on the BCD396T is over $800 but the store price is a little over $500. Around $200 on the BR330T much like the 246T pricing or do you think it will be slightly higher say $250 ?

For $200 I would get one and just put some tape over that #%$^% logo :lol:

 

[Advanced-Specialties-Inc]

Paul - I notice in the Info release where it says "CB radio receive - AM Only" ... I understand that the radio will default to the "correct" mode, but does this mean that the radio's modes are not user selectable??
A person could not dial in, say, 27.185Mhz & manually switch to FM mode?

 

[UPMan]

No, I meant no SSB. If you want to override to FM, NFM, WFM you can, though.

 

[DaveMI]

Now the question is, will the AM filter be narrow enough for shortwave brodcast band or time signal reception such as WWV :idea:

I am able to pick up WWV 20.0 MHz on the PRO-96 when conditions are right. (Note: After the Win96 frequency expand).

 

[John_M]

I think I might buy the 330T if it is cheap enough. The Nascar Logo with have to go though with a black Sharpie permanent marker. The BCD396T comes first though. I hope Uniden has enough of the BCD396T's on hand when it is released to keep up with demand. They already know that there is going to be a big demand for the 396t but I hope they don't under estimate it.

I think Uniden really had to do something to compete with GRE when they introduced the V-Folder scheme with the Pro-96. Uniden answered with dynamic memory. What I don't understand is Blue/Amber displays and keypad lighting. Make up your mind. When I get my 396T I will just have to get used to the Blue display. :lol:

 

[Dubbin]

I think Uniden really was upset with GRE when they introduced the V-Folder scheme with the Pro-96. "We have to come up with something to compete with this". Uniden answered with the dynamic memory.

And it was a GREAT answer. I'm liking the dynamic memory more then the V-Folders. Another nice thing about these new Uniden radios is the smaller size. GRE will have to really step it up to catch up with Uniden after these new radios come out. I just wish Uniden would have stayed with BNC antennas

 

[Steve2003]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed. I don't think I know anyone anymore who has an analog cell phone. Cell phones have gone digital. Soon the 700MHz broadcast band will also be useless unless you have an APCO 25 scanner. The fcc has mandated that all equipment that is using the old broadcast band must be digital.
Read the article here

 

[Grog]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed. I don't think I know anyone anymore who has an analog cell phone. Cell phones have gone digital. Soon the 700MHz broadcast band will also be useless unless you have an APCO 25 scanner. The fcc has mandated that all equipment that is using the old broadcast band must be digital.
Read the article here

Maybe when there are no analog systems. There are lots of phones & networks that use analog in more rural areas. AMPS is required until 2007 or 08 as mandated by the FCC

 

[n4voxgill]

Steve, that article is more than 5 years old and many things have changed.

The FCC formed the National Coordinating Committee (NCC) they have completed their work and submitted report on 700 MHz to the FCC. You can search FCC site and find it.

NPSTC.org has taken over the 700 MHz implementation. It is composed of local and federal representatives. Lot of information on their site. Their next meeting is in a couple of weeks in San Antonio.

Region Committees for 700 MHz have been formed and region plans are now being finalized. A national database for pre-coordination has been created. The initial grant of frequeancies for each state has been made.

 

[Voyager]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed.

I doubt it ever will. The CTIA will argue that people would just feed the discriminator into their PC and decode the digital signals, so the block is still necessary. Besides, like a 'temporary tax', it's much more difficult for the government to give than take. IOW: Once the block was passed, don't expect them to repeal it.

When ECPA was revised 10 years ago, I brought up the issue 'what happens when 869-894 is no longer Cellular?'

What would have happened if they had done the same with IMTS (a pre-cellular mobile phone service on 152/157 MHz). Bandplans DO change, and today many previous IMTS channels are used for business communications. I'm not aware of any IMTS systems left.

What happens if/when 20 years from now the 869-894 MHz band is reallocated to say... PUBLIC SAFETY!?! (I know - wait until the ban is lifted and the frequencies are added to the new scanners of the time - the ones you will wear on your wrist!)

Joe M.

 

[Concrete1]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed.

I doubt it ever will. The CTIA will argue that people would just feed the discriminator into their PC and decode the digital signals, so the block is still necessary.....Joe M.

This wouldn't be possible.
For example, in the CDMA system used by Verizn, Sprint, Alltel & others, the phone call's digital bits are transmitted / scattered across a 1.25Mhz wide frequency block. There is no scanner that can be tuned to receive all possible frequencies between a 1.25Mhz wide piece of spectrum simultaneously.
Remember, unlike APCO digital, Cellular digital isn't on 1 particular "channel" that you can type into a scanner, you need a completly different type of receiver.

 

[miller]

Are there any refinements to CloseCall feature on BR330T ? CloseCall of SC230 seems not quite flexsible to custom options for personal usage. Like, step size can't be adjust according local bandplan(hope it's userdefined!) for each band. I can't activate CloseCall and autostore detected freqs while operating scan/search function. I can't save CTCSS/DCS along with detected freqs, if possible with date and time. So I expected next generation will improve such wonderfule feature. Thanks for your excelletnt job to UPMan and your team. Hope I'm clear !

Miller, from Taipei

 

[Voyager]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed.

I doubt it ever will. The CTIA will argue that people would just feed the discriminator into their PC and decode the digital signals, so the block is still necessary.....Joe M.

This wouldn't be possible.
For example, in the CDMA system used by Verizn, Sprint, Alltel & others, the phone call's digital bits are transmitted / scattered across a 1.25Mhz wide frequency block. There is no scanner that can be tuned to receive all possible frequencies between a 1.25Mhz wide piece of spectrum simultaneously.
Remember, unlike APCO digital, Cellular digital isn't on 1 particular "channel" that you can type into a scanner, you need a completly different type of receiver.

Hmmm... I'll have to look at the local cell site on a spectrum analyzer. I never noticed that more than one channel came up for one conversation.

You're not saying the digital channels are 1.25 MHz wide, are you?

Why the 1.25 MHz range when they have channels ranging across nearly 10 MHz of spectrum? (plus some in the expansion band)

Do you have any web sites that detail the CDMA format?

Joe M.

 

[Concrete1]

I wonder when the block on the "cell phone" band is going to be removed.

I doubt it ever will. The CTIA will argue that people would just feed the discriminator into their PC and decode the digital signals, so the block is still necessary.....Joe M.

This wouldn't be possible.
For example, in the CDMA system used by Verizn, Sprint, Alltel & others, the phone call's digital bits are transmitted / scattered across a 1.25Mhz wide frequency block. There is no scanner that can be tuned to receive all possible frequencies between a 1.25Mhz wide piece of spectrum simultaneously.
Remember, unlike APCO digital, Cellular digital isn't on 1 particular "channel" that you can type into a scanner, you need a completly different type of receiver.

Hmmm... I'll have to look at the local cell site on a spectrum analyzer. I never noticed that more than one channel came up for one conversation.

You're not saying the digital channels are 1.25 MHz wide, are you?

Why the 1.25 MHz range when they have channels ranging across nearly 10 MHz of spectrum? (plus some in the expansion band)

Do you have any web sites that detail the CDMA format?

Joe M.

Yes, Digital CDMA phone calls use channels that are 1.25Mhz wide, & a large number of multiple users (calls) are simultaneously on the same channel. The Digital bits are spread all across the 1.25 Mhz channel using a unique "Walsh Code" per call.
Those 800 cell systems that still also support analog have a (small) portion of their spectrum still allocated to some 30Khz analog "1 call per channel" channels, which have nothing to do with the digital.
GSM uses 200Khz wide channels, & also has multiple different callers simultaneously per channel.

The Old original "TDMA" digital systems used 30Khz channels, however there were still multiple users time-divided on the sigle channel. Most Cellular companies that used TDMA already have or are in the process of phasing out the TDMA channels in favor of either GSM or CDMA.

 

[John_M]

Say there was no block on the Cell Phone band. I talked to my brother inlaw who works for Verizon. He told me that it took a man 10 years to break into CDMA technology. This man was hired purposefully just to try to break into it. I don't know what the other cell phone companies use. For most of us even if the cell phone band was unblocked
this band would be useless to us. So it doesn't matter to us blocked or unblocked. :lol:

 

[kikito]

For most of us even if the cell phone band was unblocked
this band would be useless to us. So it doesn't matter to us blocked or unblocked. :lol:

It should matter to everyone regardless because currently the scanner manufacturers have to employ more filters and circuitry just to, not only block the cell band but any other obvious images and ranges. Many times they just take out whole chunks of spectrum on some radios, blocking out many legal and useful frequencies. Other things they have to do is to physically restrict access (i.e. with epoxy) to crucial components so that they're not easily modifiable, etc. All that I'm sure adds just a bit more of work for the designers and a little bit more on price due to the extra work and components, etc.

As you can see there's many things to benefit from by not having to block out by law a certain range of frequencies on a receiver. I'm sure I may have forgotten several other reasons and elaboration on the subject.

 

[pro92b]

The cell band is blocked in firmware, not in the circuitry. Image suppression requirements resulted in most new models going to triple conversion. This is a good thing since it eliminated much of the image problems of the old double conversion radios. Whatever price increase it caused is worth it. The epoxy is inexpensive and labor is as well in the Chinese factories that scanner manufacturers use. GRE and Uniden do not block frequency ranges other than the cell band. My take is that the cell band laws actually helped us by giving us better radios. Now that the cell band is populated by mostly digital signals it is unmonitorable anyway.

 

[Voyager]

The cell band is blocked in firmware, not in the circuitry. Image suppression requirements resulted in most new models going to triple conversion. This is a good thing since it eliminated much of the image problems of the old double conversion radios. Whatever price increase it caused is worth it. The epoxy is inexpensive and labor is as well in the Chinese factories that scanner manufacturers use. GRE and Uniden do not block frequency ranges other than the cell band. My take is that the cell band laws actually helped us by giving us better radios. Now that the cell band is populated by mostly digital signals it is unmonitorable anyway.

But they were REQUIRED by the FCC to meet certain rejection specs for the cell images. So, part of the block in in the circuitry.

Joe M.

 

[kikito]

The cell band is blocked in firmware, not in the circuitry.

I would guess the part they do in the firmware is mainly to keep the radio from just tuning in the cellphone band frequencies but I would also guess that (like Joe M. pointed out) some of it, especially for the "images", might need to be done in the hardware.

The epoxy is inexpensive and labor is as well in the Chinese factories that scanner manufacturers use.

That might be true for a single unit BUT when you multiply .04 cents times thousands, then it starts to add up.

GRE and Uniden do not block frequency ranges other than the cell band.

That's true mostly for GRE and Uniden but I have other radios, like Yaesu's VR120 comes to mind, that have a "swiss cheese" type of spectrum coverage from all the chunks taken out due to this ban.

My take is that the cell band laws actually helped us by giving us better radios. Now that the cell band is populated by mostly digital signals it is unmonitorable anyway.

I mostly agree with that.

 

[pro92b]

I would guess the part they do in the firmware is mainly to keep the radio from just tuning in the cellphone band frequencies but I would also guess that (like Joe M. pointed out) some of it, especially for the "images", might need to be done in the hardware.

The FCC requires 38 dB suppression of cell images, not a huge amount of rejection. The image suppression is handled by the triple conversion as I noted. This is additional circuitry and well worth the expense. The fundamental cell frequencies are just blocked by firmware. If the firmware were modified to remove the block, the sensitivity of the radio would be as good as it is in the 850-868 range.

That might be true for a single unit BUT when you multiply .04 cents times thousands, then it starts to add up

I don't plan on buying thousands of units. The cost increase per unit for adding epoxy is negligible.

Some manufacturers like Yaesu and I believe Icom have not handled the cell band requirements well. That's a reflection on the competence of their engineering departments more than anything else.

Since I have only GRE and Uniden radios, for me the FCC requirements were a good thing since it forced those manufacturers to make better radios.