Vern, great information as system upgrades are expected around April of 2020. My current Motorola equipment, Minitor V pager and a CP200XLS portable will not work. My desire is a tone activated radio, that scans and can be programed. I don't need to TX side of the radio because I only monitor calls. A Kenwood Protalk Digital NXDN Series UHF CQINX340U16P work? they sell for about $329.00 but I need software to program it. Now, I am assuming they are staying on UHF, if I am reading the information correctly? Any expert advice is greatly appreciated. BTW, I spend about 5-1/2 months in Towns County each summer.
A couple of things based on your latest message:
1) The bulk of Towns County's
public safety licenses appear to be
VHF in the 151-159 MHz range. The School system has a UHF (461 MHz) freq. Hiawassee uses VHF for local government and water utility but also has a UHF freq for the water dept. Young Harris uses UHF for their water utilities and the YH College uses UHF as well.
I doubt that their system is so busy that you'd need to rely on tone activation. Either scanning them all or leaving it on the FD dispatch channel probably won't drive you crazy.
2) I'm no expert on Kenwood radios, but when I first looked into getting one I downloaded their manuals. It appeared to me that the Kenwood
ProTalk series radios are pre-programmed with a table of business band frequencies. I didn't see where you could program them with a public safety freq that wasn't already embedded in the radio's pre-programmed table. I could have misread it but that's why I avoided them as NXDN scanners. There are lots of used NXDN radios on the market. These radios are mostly mono-banders, so choose your band first. Kenwood's NXDN radios are easy to spot as their model numbers all start with "
NX".
3) I like the NX-200, NX-220 for VHF HT's and the NX-700, NX-720 for VHF mobiles. The
200/700 series both use the KPG-111D software and the
220/720 series both use the KPG-141D software. The software is available on ebay for about $14. The learning curve exists but isn't too awful. There is an easy way to inhibit transmit on any channel... enter a RECEIVE frequency and it automatically populates the TX column with the same freq. Simply erase the TX frequency completely and the radio won't transmit on that channel.
4) If you choose the
220/720 series then there are some combination programming cables that have both the 2-pin connector for the HT's and an RJ45 connector for the mobiles. (Ebay approx. $13) I already had a USB-to-Serial adapter with an FTDI chip that works with my laptop so this was a no-brainer.
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Good luck.
Vern
