richardc63 said:I'm sorry Skeygen but anyone who would butcher a perfectly good transceiver to use it as a scanner has seriously too much money to burn...
It hasn't been good since I had it - I got it for $100 + postage because the RF board is dead. I intend to keep it as a spare parts unit, because the vocoder, LCD, controller etc are all still good. For the cost of those parts, it's a steal anyway. In the meantime, it's a scanner.
richardc63 said:For a start if the radio doesn't affiliate then chances are that you may be missing interesting traffic that is not affiliated to the site you are listening too.
Same as any scanner.
If you're affiliated to a Canberra GRN site, you likely won't hear much from Sydney Water, for example.
richardc63 said:The first advantage of a real trunk scanner- being able to monitor multiple sites & decode talkgroup ids so that conversations can be far more effectively followed than on an unaffiliated handheld radio.
Doesn't matter in my case - I can only receive one GRN site from my place, and the bastard body corporate says no antennas. I hope to move out of there soon though.
richardc63 said:And I am curious about what specs a hndheld beats a quality scanner in that cannot be overcome by using a decent external antenna system.
Resistance to IMD, and a lower sensitivity to desense thanks to better (or even existent) front end filtering.
richardc63 said:Ummm.... connecting handhelds to external antennas.... you might get a rude shock about its REAL performance.
But to each his own- I really don't care all that much so long as the radio does not (EVER) affiliate to the network. The problem is that many people don't realise their radios DO (certainly yours doesn't).
Exactly. Unfortunately, few people know enough about Motorola equipment to prevent their radios from doing so while keeping them functional.
I purchased an MTS 2000 from a guy in western Sydney on eBay in 2005 (initials NB for those who know who I'm talking about.) The radio arrived with both transmit and receive control channel frequencies programmed in, set up for auto affiliation and Omnilink with RID 700001.
The seller was adamant that because the RID was set to 700001, it would not affiliate. This, of course was not the case, and he continued to sell similar radios to unknowing others as "GRN receive only", that is, until he got booted off for ripping a bloke off for a very substantial amount of money.
He appears to have continued pulling the same 700001 stunt until very recently, when his XTS 5000 got inhibited, because the GRN staff finally fired up Zone Manager and added it to the inhibit-on-sight list. Amusingly for me, and unfortunately for him, you can't revive a 5k nearly as easy as older radios.