S0 What?

[perigee123]

Alright; the first of Many Noob questions to come.

I have a BCD996T, and my first move before I hauled it personally out of the box was to have the frequencies dropped in. A lovely thing: Philadelphia, Burlington County NJ, Ocean County and Camden County NJ all at my fingertips.

Sort of.

Bear with me - I'm about to use some out-of-date vernacular....

Each of these locations has been (I assume) handily placed into their own "Banks" Theoretically, I guess, I could listen to any one of them. Theoretically.

My home "Bank" is S0. My home 'Channel' is 3, out of 9. I've figured out how to lock in and listen to just S0, 3 - but I cant seem to find the button/secondary function/ALT-CTRL-DEL that will let me listen to all of S0, while leaving S1, S2, S3 off the scan loop. Can anybody spot me a handy answer?

 

[SkipSanders]

Go here:

Easier to Read BCD996T/UBCD996T Digital Scanner Manual

Read, and learn.

 

[perigee123]

Thanks.... I've seen that; I was just hoping to be able to Use the radio while I dug through it.

... Just out of curiosity, when people ask you for directions, do you toss them a map?

 

[bpsmicro]

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is "it depends". And it depends entirely on how your scanner was programmed. So to get the *actual* answer, you'll need to confer with whoever programmed it for you, or "reverse-engineer" that programming.

There are the systems (previously known as "banks"), and the groups, and then the individual channels under that (which may be conventional frequencies or talkgroups of trunked systems). So to give you an accurate answer to your question, we'd have to ask *you* a bunch of questions, and you'd then have to figure things out enough to answer our questions so we can answer your questions.
If we tried to feed you all possible variations of possible answers to what seems like a simple question, your head may explode trying to wort it all out. We've seen it, and it ain't pretty.

Having said that, the *possible* thing you're looking for is how to get at something like System Key 11. That would be 'dot'-1-1. So you may be looking for 'dot'-1-<something>, 'dot'-2-<something>, etc.

Brad.

P.S. To use your map analogy, think of the equivalent of asking for directions to an address in a town 500 miles away, with no interstate highways in between, *and* you don't know the name of the street. In that case, yes, tossing you a map (and at least showing you where you are now on it) may be the best response.

 

[NE1C4NSC4N]

you should be able to hit the scan button and it will go back to scanning the entire bank/banks you have programmed, if I understand what you meant at least..post back more info maybe..

 

[hfxChris]

My home "Bank" is S0. My home 'Channel' is 3, out of 9. I've figured out how to lock in and listen to just S0, 3 - but I cant seem to find the button/secondary function/ALT-CTRL-DEL that will let me listen to all of S0, while leaving S1, S2, S3 off the scan loop. Can anybody spot me a handy answer?

Ok, I think I see the issue. You're not quite understanding how the display is read.

Instead of banks, those numbers are for the systems programmed into your scanner. The scanner can have up to 100 (00-99) system quick keys - if you're seeing S0 and then a 3 on the line next to it, that means you have system quick key 3 (03) turned on. If you had S0 and then say a number 9 in the line next to it, that's system quick key 9 (09).
If you had something programmed into system quick key 73, you would see S7 and a 3 in the line next to it. System quick key 40 would be displayed as an S4 with a 0 in the line next to it.
The number after the S is not the 'bank' number, it's just part of the two-digit system quick key number.

Hope that clears part of it up

 

[hiegtx]

Alright; the first of Many Noob questions to come.

I have a BCD996T, and my first move before I hauled it personally out of the box was to have the frequencies dropped in. A lovely thing: Philadelphia, Burlington County NJ, Ocean County and Camden County NJ all at my fingertips.

Sort of.

Bear with me - I'm about to use some out-of-date vernacular....

Each of these locations has been (I assume) handily placed into their own "Banks" Theoretically, I guess, I could listen to any one of them. Theoretically.

My home "Bank" is S0. My home 'Channel' is 3, out of 9. I've figured out how to lock in and listen to just S0, 3 - but I cant seem to find the button/secondary function/ALT-CTRL-DEL that will let me listen to all of S0, while leaving S1, S2, S3 off the scan loop. Can anybody spot me a handy answer?

perigee,
As bpsmicro has already indicated, what you're seeing with the "S0", and trying to turn on, or off, the "S1, S2,..etc" are the system or site quick keys.

There's a good explanation of how those are used, & how to turn them on or off while the scanner is in operation, in this Wiki article.

Yes, it's a full page of reading, but trying to condense it to only a sentence or two would leave out way too much to be of much help.

 

[eaf1956]

Systems

Alright; the first of Many Noob questions to come.

I have a BCD996T, and my first move before I hauled it personally out of the box was to have the frequencies dropped in. A lovely thing: Philadelphia, Burlington County NJ, Ocean County and Camden County NJ all at my fingertips.

Sort of.

Bear with me - I'm about to use some out-of-date vernacular....

Each of these locations has been (I assume) handily placed into their own "Banks" Theoretically, I guess, I could listen to any one of them. Theoretically.

My home "Bank" is S0. My home 'Channel' is 3, out of 9. I've figured out how to lock in and listen to just S0, 3 - but I cant seem to find the button/secondary function/ALT-CTRL-DEL that will let me listen to all of S0, while leaving S1, S2, S3 off the scan loop. Can anybody spot me a handy answer?

Well, if it were an XT model you could HOLD the HOLD/RESUME key to do a SYSTEM LOCK to just scan S0. On the T you would have to lock out the other systems. The DMA sceme doesn't use BANKs and CHANNELS it uses SYSTEMS and Talk GROUPS. If all the SYSTEMS are in the S0 to S9 ranges that would just involve pushing the corresponding key. 1 for S1, 2 for S2 etc to lock and unlock them. Other SYSTEMS for example S13 would require more key presses (.No,1,3) I put SYSTEMS I lock and UNLOCK often in the S0 to S9 range for easy access and SYSTEMS I rarely lock out in other SYSTEMS like S13 or S31. I hope this helps and I am not trying to put you down for the old terminology. Maybe some of the other guys will have better TIPS in later posts.

 

[eaf1956]

I wonder if by "My Home Channel is 3, out of 9" he is referring to the GROUP Numbers?

 

[perigee123]

Thanks guys - Sorry for the snap. This thing is so counter-intuitive that it's making me pull out what little remains of my hair.

What it looks like is yes - I thought that the "S" was a "Bank", in old palance, where really a "Bank" is now a "Group," and as far as I can tell my handy HAM programmer didn't parse any of these. So, naturally, I couldn't isolate the "S0", because, essentially, it's just frequencies 1-9.

I Think...

SO, at least now I know what I have to do - start programming my own groups, so I can properly isolate the frequencies I want to keep together and handy.

Again, thanks for the assist, and pardon for my prickly response.

- Bob

 

[hfxChris]

Not quite. S is for System, groups are on the next line down and start with GRP.