w2lpa
Member
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2018
- Messages
- 57
- Reaction score
- 40
I had an earlier thread on my futile efforts to homebrew program the PRO-160 and PRO-93. After utter defeat, and lacking a few parts to build the proper cable despite having a huge amount of Radio Shack clearance electronic parts and junk here at my QTH, I broke down and bought a cable.
First, the PRO-160. After hours of failed connections and about to blame the cable and return it, I got it to work: the trick is to turn the scanner on THEN plug into the PC/IF jack on the scanner. It doesn't work with the cable in and then powering the scanner up. The mono adapter is used.
After connecting, I bought the ARC-160 software as it was $20. After earlier hand-keying all of the tags and freqs on the scanner, it was REALLY nice to make some changes like tagging the banks and downloading them! (I think that many of us of a certain ... vintage.. are used to hand-entering frequencies, typing in BASIC programs from magazines, and other laborious efforts.)
On to the PRO-93. Also uses the mono adapter. The cable's documentation was wrong. I was able to connect but the Win93 software on Win 10 crashed immediately after. Tried running it in an XP virtual machine. It worked once, but crashed thereafter. Some research shows that I'm not alone in having this issue.
Tried the Scancat demo. I know that many dish on this software.. but it worked. I would buy it but it seems that the developer is a SK and that's not possible.
I couldn't find any other software for the PRO-93 so unless someone knows of an alternative, the only avenue I see at present is to try to reverse-engineer the undocumented PRO93 serial protocol and roll something of my own.
What I want to do ultimately, is have a master Excel of my frequencies with derived worksheet for each of my scanners (they have different banks, limitations on tags, etc) and be able to load them via computer. I have 5 computer interfaceable scanners PRO-160, PRO-93, PRO-2052, PRO-2041 and PRO-64, and I can now do that with 4 out of the 5.
First, the PRO-160. After hours of failed connections and about to blame the cable and return it, I got it to work: the trick is to turn the scanner on THEN plug into the PC/IF jack on the scanner. It doesn't work with the cable in and then powering the scanner up. The mono adapter is used.
After connecting, I bought the ARC-160 software as it was $20. After earlier hand-keying all of the tags and freqs on the scanner, it was REALLY nice to make some changes like tagging the banks and downloading them! (I think that many of us of a certain ... vintage.. are used to hand-entering frequencies, typing in BASIC programs from magazines, and other laborious efforts.)
On to the PRO-93. Also uses the mono adapter. The cable's documentation was wrong. I was able to connect but the Win93 software on Win 10 crashed immediately after. Tried running it in an XP virtual machine. It worked once, but crashed thereafter. Some research shows that I'm not alone in having this issue.
Tried the Scancat demo. I know that many dish on this software.. but it worked. I would buy it but it seems that the developer is a SK and that's not possible.
I couldn't find any other software for the PRO-93 so unless someone knows of an alternative, the only avenue I see at present is to try to reverse-engineer the undocumented PRO93 serial protocol and roll something of my own.
What I want to do ultimately, is have a master Excel of my frequencies with derived worksheet for each of my scanners (they have different banks, limitations on tags, etc) and be able to load them via computer. I have 5 computer interfaceable scanners PRO-160, PRO-93, PRO-2052, PRO-2041 and PRO-64, and I can now do that with 4 out of the 5.
