Need Help, I am in Houston area and when I add a favorite list to sentinel for example Houston Police it adds all control Channels from all Houston. Therefor it takes for ever to come around and misses a lot of calls. My question is: Where or how can i go on just getting the control channels for a certain department? I could'nt find anything on Radio reference. I have a SDS-200.
When you are creating a Favorites list in Sentinel, by appending some (or all) of the various departments of a trunked system to the list you are creating, Sentinel appends
all of the sites in the system, along with the Departments that you selected. There is nothing in the RadioReference database, and hence in Sentinel, that specifies which sites carry the radio traffic for talkgroups in any specific department. So, you can leave them there, but use location control so that Sentinel will ignore those out of range. That's one choice.
Your other choices are to either manually set the extra sites to Avoid (locked out), or manually delete them. I prefer to delete them. Some people, though, prefer to leave them in place, letting location control handle the extras by ignoring those out of range, in case at some point they are in one of those more distant locations, possibly using a GPS, but even if location was entered manually (not using a GPS), those normally out of area sites would then be scanned using location control. Note that, once you append a system to a Favorites list, as long as you leave the name set
exactly as it appears in the database, you can go back & add additional departments without also adding back the unwanted sites.
Your better move, since you are a Premium Subscriber, is to use software to import only the sites, and related departments, that you desire, without having to deal with a cluster of unwanted sites. I prefer using
ProScan, because for the base $50 license fee, you get software that can handle programming for a large number of Uniden scanners. Not just current models, but also many that were discontinued many years ago. Besides programming, ProScan also gives you logging and virtual control, as well as other functions. (See ProScan's
website for more details on models supported as well as features included.) Butel's
ARC536 can also do database imports, but only covers the x36HP & SDS series scanners. No other models are supported. The "Basic" version, about $40, handles programming, including database imports. If you want Virtual Control, and additional features, then you need to spring for the $70 "Pro" version.
