I precisely replicated my MD FIRST 700mhz Phase II mobile testing (536HP) in Cecil and Central/Northern portions of Kent County yesterday. Reception was a little better everywhere, without any programming or hardware changes - but it is completely possible that this is reflective of changes in atmospheric conditions. Overall, I saw no truly substantial changes in performance or audio quality. See page 2 of this thread for details of my prior testing, which was done 5 days ago. Overall, reception of FIRST was between very good and excellent in Kent.....but certainly not perfect. Reception in Cecil, along the I-95 corridor was very good and along the Route 213 corridor (heading south from I-95) was mostly good but occasionally very good. It is certainly important to note that the tower build-out is fully completed in Kent but is evidently not yet 100% completed in Cecil (so I'm told). I should note that I didn't have my GRE800 along for side-by-side comparison this time around. As referenced in my previous test report, there really wasn't a huge difference between the 536 and 800 in performance, overall. Sure, there were some reception disparities between the two radios (one way or the other) in certain focal locations - but when the whole geographic test on the Upper Eastern Shore is averaged out, both radios were reasonably comparable on MD FIRST 700.
As I referenced in an earlier post, the 536 does consistently outperform the GRE800 in Baltimore City and Central/Northern Baltimore County on the FIRST 700 Phase II system - and this remains the case in my updated testing today. It is a clear winner in this specific geographic subset.
It is quite difficult to conduct really well controlled trials with these radios on Phase I/II systems, since changing environmental factors play such significant roles in end results. At my home location, I note quite overt variability in decoding success with altered weather patterns. The ice storm some days ago, not surprisingly, considerably degraded my 536's performance on Phase I and Phase II systems. So, in a nutshell, tying to compare results from one point in time to the next is something of an apples to oranges matchup.