Slow acquiring of the control channel on multisite APCO25

[dizwiz]

One of my many gripes on using my BC296D mobilely to monitor Ohios MARCS system is that if it loses the control channel, it takes a long time (it slowly steps through each channel in the bank - all 100 of them) to reaquire the control channel.

I talked with Uniden on how to best program in a multisite system for mobile monitoring on a BC296D and they said to use CC only mode, program the talkgroup ID's im interested in, and set it to ID scan.

Ive found some other tricks, but this is besides the point.

Regardless of how its programmed, if it loses the control channel for an instant, it slowly steps through 99 channels until it picks up the control channel again. Very annoying, I miss a lot of conversations in the mean time as this can take 2-3 minutes.

 

[richster]

Hi dizwiz,

Uniden's suggestion is right on the ball, using the CC only mode is the absoulute best way to go. With this option, all you have to do is program in all the known CC's and your set.

This way you won't need to use all 99 channels in a bank, because only the CC's will be in there. So if you do loose the CC, your scanner won't take so long doing the loop around. 99 channels!!, wow that must be a heck of a multisite system.

Regards,
Richster.

 

[richster]

Wow I just looked up that system in the database, and man is it huge. Yup definately CC only mode!

 

[rdale]

Why don't you just enter your local frequencies? Even if you went with all instead of CC for some reason it wouldn't be 100...

 

[loumaag]

dizwiz,

Here is an idea, I don't know if it will work, but give it a shot. Since the design of the Uniden scanner is not CC from the the get-go (like the GRE models), it has a pretty rotten way of handling CC loss. So trick it, have another bank active, so when it looses the CC instead of just searching through the current bank, it will jump to the next bank, scan it (put a couple of conventionals in it) and then when it returns to the TRS bank, it will scan quicly to acquire a CC. It seems to work that way on my 796 when I am monitoring towers far away and it looses the CC intermitenly; however, I am doing it on a VHF which means I can't get do CC only. Your performance may be different.