I'm wondering if the volume control got wore out from having to turn the radio off/on when disconnecting from the charger?
Just curious but why do you need to turn the radio off/on when disconnecting from the charger?
I rarely turn mine off when connecting or disconnecting the charger.
I have seen one radio that displayed an "illegal voltage" message before but I think that may have been a Uniden. Whatever make it was, it was rare that that message was displayed.
The 106/197 radios do use a horrible taper for the volume pots. Way too much gain in the low end which makes them hard to find a low volume setting like may be needed when you don't want to disturb others.
I've also seen the two models appear to have "dirty" controls where you can sometimes hear scratchy sounding audio as you rotate the control.
This is usually fixed by a squirt of tuner or control cleaner in most radios pots but the pots are pretty well sealed in the 106/197 and GRE models so it's hard to get cleaner in them.
I once had my PSR600 get the dirty pot problem scratchy sound. I could not get rid of it by cleaning so for some reason, I wired in a brand new temporary pot and was surprised to still hear the scratchy sounding audio. It turned out to be poor filtering around the audio circuit and seemed to be amplified from the non audio taper pot used. I forget exactly what I did but I fixed it by adding a resistor or cap across something in the audio stage going by the schematic Radio Shack sells for the 106 and 197 models. I was also able to add a fixed level output that would feed a tape or line input on an external recorder.
I'd still like to find a new pot that fits both mechanically and physically but has a correct audio taper instead of a linear taper like GRE used.
And to the OP, the broken control should not have any affect on Pro96com operation as the point that audio is taken is well before the volume control pot. It is actually not even audio for Pro96com, it taps the data slicers output in those models. It's already a digital signal at that point when the radios are in C-CH output mode.
I do wish the author of Pro96com would add in an input selection for pure discriminator audio though so the program could be run independent of radio type for decoding. Kind of like how Unitrunker can run. Unitrunker can run from true discriminator audio but Pro96com has a much cleaner GUI that I find easier to understand.
Of course Unitrunker can work for several different types of trunked systems and not just P25 systems so it wins hands down for that.
Pro96com would still be nice if it accepted discriminator audio for an input though. I'd love to be able to use my Icom R9000 and R7000 with Pro96com. Those receivers hear P25 signals that none of the digital scanners will even hear due to overload or other cruddy signals that are found in large metro areas.
