Uniden DMA Programming Help/Advice (BCD396XT)?

[aliby19]

Hello,

After owning my BCD396XT for some time, I am still learning more and more about the scanner. I have currently programmed the scanner to monitor my local area's talkgroups (Monroe County, IN) as well as a few statewide talkgroups.

What I'm curious to get some advice on is how to add/program more than just my local area into my scanner. Currently it is set up like so:

System 01: Indiana Statewide (Conventional)
.....Group(s): Fire/EMS, DNR, DHS, etc...

System 02: Monroe County Conventional
.....Group(s): Fire, EMS, Police, Sheriff, Other...

System 03: Monroe County Safe-T
.....Group(s): Fire, EMS, Police/Sheriff, DHS, DNR etc (as stated before I have a mix of local and statewide channels in this system as it is the primary location I monitor)

I feel that this makes it easy for me to enable/disable monitoring of counties as I pass through them with the touch of one button. However, after some thought, it seems that if I ever wanted to program all of Indiana's SAFE-T system into my 396XT (using the same setup above where each county has its own system or even two with one for SAFE-T and one for Conventional), it would fill up almost all of the 99 systems available in my 396XT.

Does anyone have any other thoughts or better ideas on how to program these into my 396XT?

Thanks!

 

[sjlamb]

Your XT can program up to 500 systems. Your confusing the Quick Key limit of "99" with the number of systems that can be programmed. You can assign the same Quick Key number to mutiple Systems so, for example, you could break up the Safe-T System into, say, four Quick Keys: North, South, East, West.... or any other way you like. This example means that the entire system could be programmed with just (4) of the (99) Quick Keys at your disposal.

Keep in mind, however, that your set-up must abide by these limits. Use more Quick Keys to break it up further to stay within these limits:

Channels: 25,000 maximum
Systems: 500 maximum
Groups per system: 20 maximum
Talkgroups per trunked system: 500 maximum

 

[aliby19]

Thank you for that. I have considered/investigated that same idea as well. In that case, I considered having each county set up as a group in that case so again I can turn each on/off as I travel. My problem with this setup is that there are only 10 GQKs available per system. So, my region would be limited to a 10 county area. Since there are 92 counties in Indiana, I would need 10 regions/systems.

My problem is that I don't know how to split up Indiana into 10 regions. I've attached two maps of Indiana regions, one of the actual breakdown of the four Indiana Safe-T regions and another of just a generic Indiana region map.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[Ablice]

Gee, one big trunking system...

I just dealt with this issue on my 396T and FreeScan + BCTool.

Sit back, this one may be long...

1) Decide what you really want. I only am interested in police, emergency ops, certain federal / state agencies. I am not interested in fire, EMS, public works, animal control, ugh, school districts, etc. For my own county it's fine, but not for the whole state.

2) Decide how you want it organized. Since my 396T does NOT support multi-site trunked systems, I had a real dilemma with big trunking systems like San Diego/Imperial County (SAFE-T in IN is even bigger though). Yours however does, but that still leaves the issue of sorting and organizing. I organized mine like this:

Priority System
[county where I live] County/Cities
CA Highway Patrol
Nationwide (modified to include MURS, some additional UHF buisness freqs, quick keys etc)
CA Mil/Fed Ops C (suffix C standing for Conventional)
Federal Ops C
CA St. Agencies C (CALFIRE, American Red Cross, Dept. of Justice, etc)
Northern CA Divsn C (all northern sheriff and city PDs, and certain "hot freqs")
Central CA Divsin C
LA County C
Southern CA Divsion C

Now we get to the trunking ones:
Alemeda Cnty TK (trunk)
Barstow SB TK (san bernadino county, trunked)
....etc in alphabetical order.

I can show you in more detail how I organized it, but let's just say you need a map of the counties (58) and a quick key list to figure out where Napa County is.

3) Conduct the organization. bcTool would crash upon entering the radioreference database, but FreeSCAN would not. FreeSCAN has a better duplicate freq finder, sorts its systems by name in alphabetical order, and requires cut-n-paste transfer of freqs. bcTool requires that you right-click and "copy to / move to", looks more grown-up, sorts systems by quick key number, and some other stuff.

Since your scanner supports multi-site trunked systems, I would split it into three systems (and 500 TGIDs per system, not 200 like mine) and sort the sites for each northern, central and southern sectors. If I could only do that with my trunking systems...i would not have 45 trunking systems to sort through, and I'm not sure on san diego, since I had no choice but to put all trunking freqs into one "site"...

ETA:

I put the Priority System quick key 1, so if I hear a cruiser go by code 3 I just press 2 and 3 to turn off my county system and CHP, and press 1 to find out what the action is: it has the local sheriff and PD so I can quickly find out what is going on -- like earlier this morning at around 0:35 hours turns out there was a pedestrian vs vehicle ... you can do that with your primary county of residence too -- just make one system a single site for your area (or as needed) and only program the "hot" freqs.

 

[aliby19]

Thank you for explaining that. It seems to make sense to me. Being in Fire/EMS, I tend to scan everything in my county except for the school busses and unrelated items. I leave Dept of Transportation in as they can sometimes be useful to know what's going on especially during snow/winter season.

I'd love to see more about how you set it up. Would you be able to send me your FreeScan file?

Thanks!

 

[Ablice]

Sure. I'll PM it to you.

Keep in mind, bcTool tends to work better for me. Although, when I reformed the alpha tags, FreeSCAN was better for that since it would add the frequency comment in an additional field (you have to check the box in the download options menu). You'll see it.

I'll give you both my bcTool and FreeSCAN file, I do prefer the bcTool because I can organize the convential systems to be seperate from the trunked, instead of all alphabetically like FreeSCAN does it.