BCD436HP/BCD536HP: Uniden BCD436HP Very Low Volume No software issue

[cr8054]

My Uniden BCD436HP Used to have great volume with the built in speaker. Now I can barely hear it in a quiet room. I reset all of my settings which erased all of the frequencies I had programmed into it. I also updated the scanner's firmware via the Sentinel software. Still the audio via the speaker is painfully low. The audio on my headphones is fine. So right now the only place I can use it is in my car where I plug the scanner into the aux port and use my car stereo to listen to my scanner when out railfanning. If I need to spend time outside, I use a Beofeng radio as the speaker is loud and it has a very long battery life. Does anyone know of a fix to this problem other than taking it to a repair shop?

 

[Ubbe]

It could be just the speakers contact surfaces, those brass springy things, that needs cleaning up, or a new $10 speaker that are fairly easy to replace yourself. It's the same speaker in a lot of different scanner models. Here's a link to the European distributor but you probably want it to be shipped more local.

SPEAKER 0022 - UBC125XLT/UBC75XLT 24E/0.5W/32MM

/Ubbe

 

[cr8054]

Thanks for your reply, I may consider doing it. I am a little nervous about messing with it too much. I fiddled with SD card and the little metal clip that holds the SD card popped completely off. It took vary harrowing hour or so to get things back together. I will NEVER mess with that thing again. I was relieved that after I got the SD card back in and secured, that my scanner fired back up and the few frequencies that I reprogrammed in were still there. It took quite some time to get a windows emulator that would work with my Mac. First I tried WineBottler, but Winebottler only works with 32 bit systems. My Mac runs on Monterey OS which is 64 bit. The 64 bit OS is not backwards compatible. I lost my old Photoshop Elements and a couple of games I liked as their developer did not come up with a 64 bit version of the game.

 

[Ubbe]

I fiddled with SD card and the little metal clip that holds the SD card popped completely off. It took vary harrowing hour or so to get things back together.

The exact same thing happened to me. It's a very flimsy and awkward design they have chosen to use, not at all like most mobile phones. It doesn't even holds the SD card in a precise location and can be a little offset that creates intermittent read and write errors. Better not touch that if it works properly.

/Ubbe

 

[JoeBearcat]

The issue may also be a bad bypass contact in the earphone connector. With the unit powered off, run a plug in and out of it a few times and re-test.

 

[darrellmaurina]

I have what's likely the same problem -- earphone works fine but zero output on the speaker.
I've tried plugging and unplugging the earphone a half dozen times, as @JoeBearcat recommended, with no obvious results.
Before I open the case to see if the problem is the speaker, any suggestions or warnings I need to know to avoid ruining the scanner?

I've already updated the firmware and database with Sentinel, after finally figuring out the reason it said I don't have .NET Framework 2.0 installed is that I needed to go to the "Turn Windows Features ON or OFF" in the control panel. Don't know why it was turned off but that allowed the firmware update.

 

[pb_lonny]

Sounds like a blown speaker

 

[JoeBearcat]

Or a bad speaker connection. It has happened in 436s.

 

[kenn_moses]

Audio output is very important to me, good quality sound is what I am looking for. A bad speaker connection or blown speaker aside, is the audio out of the 436HP easy to listen to? I don't want a "tinny" sound or a distorted sound. Before I put down the cash for a 436 I would really appreciate a few other opinions. Thanks

Ken - N0VA

 

[hexagon_keyhole]

Audio output is very important to me, good quality sound is what I am looking for. A bad speaker connection or blown speaker aside, is the audio out of the 436HP easy to listen to? I don't want a "tinny" sound or a distorted sound. Before I put down the cash for a 436 I would really appreciate a few other opinions. Thanks

Ken - N0VA

I have mentioned it before on another thread, but the weatherproofing on the SDS100 contributes to the “lacking of luster” of audio, but the BCD436HP sounds a lot better than the SDS100 in my humble opinion.

 

[Ubbe]

I would really appreciate a few other opinions. Thanks

It will never be like a mobile/base scanners many times bigger speakers, but the 436 has a limited high frequency speaker response so that it filters background noise better and have a more pleasant low/middle frequency quality to it that makes it easy to listen to. Not at all like a SDS100s speaker that seems to be tuned to the high frequency range of noise.

But the more bassy a speaker are the more power it needs to handle and it's just a tiny 0,5W speaker and its amplifier are probably not more than that either. If you listen to a 0,5W tone at 1000Hz it would need 5W at 200Hz to sound equally loud to your ears. Uniden usually has a 250Hz high pass filter to get rid of CTCSS/DCS tones from the speaker audio and that will also reduce the speaker power needed.

I use volume level 6 at my desk to equal other scanners volume and going to 10 are very loud but going higher for me up to its max setting of 15 doesn't change audio level as it already have reach max at 10 and only distort and compress the sound at higher levels. But that also depends of the systems you monitor what they actually have their audio levels set to.

/Ubbe

 

[wtp]

stick a computer speaker on it and make it a new base.
i was going to do that with a 396T that had a problem like that.

 

[kenn_moses]

Here is my current set-up. I don't see a brand name on the external speaker I am using but it sounds good. I spend a lot of time at my PC and enjoy listening to the scanner at the same time so it works well for me. Probably never get that level of sound from a hand-held as adding an external speaker to a small portable scanner doesn't appeal to me.

 

[JoeBearcat]

Audio is extremely subjective. Ask 10 people and you will get 11 different opinions.