Uniden 996 and State Smartzone

[woodyrr]

The post about Edmond upgrading their radio system and the mention of users of the state system getting system busy tones on the OKC site reminded me: Do those of you familiar with the 996 know if the feature that allows monitoring trunked radio system loading can be toggled on and left on. A frustrating feature of my 396 is that when activated, the bars indicating frequencies in use are only on for a few seconds.:roll:

 

[mam1081]

Are you talking about the active channel display? I'm slightly confused by your question.

If you are talking about the active channel display (has bars indicating how many and which channels are currently active on a TRS), yes the 996 does allow you to use that (toggle it on or off - scannerwide (not by system)).

 

[woodyrr]

Are you talking about the active channel display? I'm slightly confused by your question.

If you are talking about the active channel display (has bars indicating how many and which channels are currently active on a TRS), yes the 996 does allow you to use that (toggle it on or off - scannerwide (not by system)).

I'm sorry about the confusion, I scoured my 396 owner's manual to find out what the feature is called and came up empty. Yes, I'm talking about the string of little rectangles that light up to indicate how many of the available channels are in use. Why Uniden came to the conclusion that someone wouldn't want to watch that display on the 396 for more than a few seconds is beyond me.

Thanks for the response. Once I found out that it will not cost a fortune for a GPS unit that will interface with it, I ordered a 996 and have borrowed a GPS unit from a friend so that I can play with it.

 

[Freqed]

Anybody else taken back by the lack of ID's in the preprogrammed State system? It would not even hit here in the Tulsa area when I got mine up and going. Reprogrammed everything to get what I wanted. Makes me wonder how it will do using GPS and traveling.

 

[mam1081]

Thats why you just need to make your own lists!

While driving, the GPS functionality is great (if you have it programmed correctly).

 

[woodyrr]

I plan to reprogram mine and am going to try to achieve as much commonality throughout the programming with my 396 as I can. How common I can make them, I guess, will depend on how the 996 handles multiple site systems. I downloaded the manual, but haven't had much time to look at it.

I was a bit ho-hum about this unit until I realized that in the scheme of things, it is really more revolutionary than evolutionary. I rank it with: The scanning radio itself; The synthesized scanner with keypad and display; The Trunktracker scanner; And now, the GPS enabled scanner.

I think, although it will sit on my desk most of the time, fiddling with the GPS part is going to be interesting, especially tweaking the "circles" figuring out where they need to be, how big, and how much they should overlap.

It will also be interesting watching the "active channel display" as channel usage changes.