hiegtx said:
Scooter,
They don't work differently as far as I know, but the 96 & 2096 were not designed with the 700mhz spectrum in mind. It can be accessed to receive by enabling in WIN96. But the firmware apparently will not recognize it as a valid section of spectrum for trunk tracking. I believe someone asked Don Starr this some time back, if it could be handled with a custom table; I think his answer then was no. If anyone could develop a work around, you'd figure he could, and would pass it along <snip>
The difference is that trunking in P25 or Motorola SmartNet/ SmartZone references a table of predesignated channel numbers instead of frequency. These were not defined when the Pro-96 and 2096 firmware was written several years ago. I'm not even sure if the scanner will work with rebanded NPSPAC frequencies once they slide 15 MHz down without a firmware change. Much of the legacy 800 MHz radio equipment that will undergo rebanding can't without new firmware. The UHF and VHF trunked systems which use custom tables or a baseline frequency work in systems which were designed for other bands and transmit some of the frequency-dependent information in their control channel. You can build a table around that.
Now that there are some 700 MHz systems turning up, maybe there could be some experimentation with tables to see if they can work. Maybe, maybe not. I tried scanning the portable 700 MHz system at APCO in Denver last year and could not. I didn't even try this year in Orlando.
The recent release of a DSP flash really took me by surprise. GRE's still dedicated to making this work! That's truly exciting! Maybe this means that an upgrade (it would have to be a factory trip, like the v.1.3 debacle) is possible. The Shack had a dress rehearsal for that a couple of years ago. I sent mine in and it took about 6 months to get it back, but at least they didn't lose it. That's the nice thing about these things - if the RF hardware can accommodate it (and it does), just about anything is possible with software. Sad thing is that the 'no scan on cellular' (which you can't hear anymore anyway) rule most likely required this be another chip swap when it could have been as simple as another flash.
I've got all the confidence in the world in whatever Don Starr says. He knows this product inside and out and I think he's earned trust through the great stuff he's done. Perhaps he'd be able to construct a custom table alias for the 700 MHz frequencies to make it all work through software and it will be as simple as a checkbox