Update From Whistler / Goliad Products LLC - March 6, 2025

[prcguy]

I just got a notice that Whistler will have a booth at Dayton this year. I'm going and I'll demand they get Wendy back.

 

[AK9R]

I just got a notice that Whistler will have a booth at Dayton this year. I'm going and I'll demand they get Wendy back.

I'd be more concerned about when they think they might have some new products.

 

[KevinC]

I just got a notice that Whistler will have a booth at Dayton this year. I'm going and I'll demand they get Wendy back.

I heard they will have "Goliad George" there.

 

[AB5ID]

 

[EricCottrell]

I just got a notice that Whistler will have a booth at Dayton this year. I'm going and I'll demand they get Wendy back.

Yes, Booth 5006. Wendy likely moved on to a better opportunity.

 

[prcguy]

I heard they will have "Goliad George" there.

I wont be posing for a picture with that guy and we won't be fondling each others TRX-1s. But I will pose again for this lady!

Hey, is that a big sweat stain on my shirt or a shadow from the radio? Aww damn, I think she was making me sweat....

 

[spacellamaman]

I think it's a long road to a new Whistler scanner, and there's also a marketing issue where so many users are police/fire buffs and so many agencies are encrypting as they modernize. It's not a great incentive to work tirelessly on solving P25 simulcast. There's no cure for encryption--except outlawing it--so feel free to write me in for President in 2028. I'm also not sure that DMR/NXDN trunk tracking is going to be worth it if the licensing fees drive the scanner out of reach. The future market for scanners is likely those of us who do it even though we can't hear the police anymore, and that calls for a more powerful device which restores features that GRE didn't continue from the PSR500/600 as they developed the PSR800. As far as I can tell, the TRX-1 is still a PSR800 with a keypad and a couple modes added.
I've bought no less than 4 used TRX-1's from frustrated users and am very happy with them. Let me relate some things that I'm grateful for in this radio, that Uniden doesn't provide AFAIK.
1 - Pocket Size. Perfect height/width/depth. I would tolerate a little more height in a future model if more of the PSR500 feature set were restored and the 3 softkeys were added to facilitate adjustments in the field.
2 - Operation with 4 AA batteries aligned into a single layer...helping keep the radio from getting too 'fat.' Uniden still doesn't do a good job with thickness.
3 - THE ABILITY TO INSTANTLY ENTER AND MONITOR A FREQUENCY IN THE FIELD. Why would ANY scanner lack that ability?
4 - Display options including 'stealth' and 'light on unmute', for less ostentatious monitoring in the field. Would love to have an antenna that looks like a cigarette or cigar sticking out of my pocket. Maybe I should get a real cigar and hollow it out.
5 - A very sturdy case, that can stand reasonably careful use without having to bury the radio in rubber. Glad to have the bouncy option, but much more glad to make the radio less cumbersome.
6 - The ability (via Object Oriented User Interface) to operate the scanner in a simple, old-school way if I don't program it in a complex way.
7 - The ability to organize DMR and NXDN systems in trunking groups, even though the radio isn't trunk tracking in those modes. I got a cheaper radio and was able to bypass Uniden's growing pains.
8 - The large number of Scan Lists available in each V-Scanner. I keep about 30 as custom 'service searches' and 10 more as scratchpads. Happy to have lotsa potential V-Scanners too, which allows me to create and store multiple boilerplates that can be customized quickly in the field.
So Whistler Support--if you're reading the mail here--know that all of these things make your products my preference. A great way to improve the product without adding more licensing fees might be to restore those old PSR500 features that GRE abandoned in their effort to produce their own version of the Home Patrol.

What are the old PSR500 features that you liked so well? Wondering if I am missing out here.

 

[AK9R]

Hey, is that a big sweat stain on my shirt or a shadow from the radio?

Shadow of a fist with an index finger pointed at your chin...or, a scary clown face.

 

[prcguy]

Shadow of a fist with an index finger pointed at your chin...or, a scary clown face.

Oh you might be right, I think we were across from the Uniden booth and a guy had his hand in the air but I was too distracted to see what he was doing with it.

 

[natedawg1604]

Any form of SDR isn't going to be as capable as a scanner. If for no other reason that it requires a computer to operate. ....

Well Harris figured it out with their Falcon III series, which does AM through SAT band and P25 trunking, in addition to the fancy military specific stuff. I believe one of those portables has multiple VFOs.

Sure would be nice if someone else figured out how to do a similar SDR product for the civilian market....

 

[prcguy]

Well Harris figured it out with their Falcon III series, which does AM through SAT band and P25 trunking, in addition to the fancy military specific stuff. I believe one of those portables has multiple VFOs.

Sure would be nice if someone else figured out how to do a similar SDR product for the civilian market....

Harris Falcon III are transceivers as in they also transmit. I thought this was a thread about police scanners/receivers? Some of the early Falcon HF radios would scroll up and down in frequency so it could sort of tune like a VFO but its not a VFO. Most if not all the current Falcon stuff has to be programmed for a specific frequency and I don't think they can scroll in frequency and still receive as the frequency needs to be locked in during the programming.

 

[AK9R]

Any form of SDR isn't going to be as capable as a scanner. If for no other reason that it requires a computer to operate.

If your idea of an "SDR" is a receiver/converter box connected to a Windows or Mac laptop, I think that's an old paradigm. Given the small size of today's "computer" chips, creating a portable, handheld SDR capable of scanning radio frequencies and decoding digital protocols should be doable. Think about the computer running inside every Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, and other smartphones for the past 20 years. There should be enough computing power in the average smartphone to run SDR software.

And, you don't need a traditional CPU. The Icom SDR radios (IC-7300, IC-7610, IC-9700, IC-705, etc.) use FPGAs to do the computing. And, yes, they are software defined radios in that the incoming RF signal is directly sampled, digitized, and processed.

 

[prcguy]

If your idea of an "SDR" is a receiver/converter box connected to a Windows or Mac laptop, I think that's an old paradigm. Given the small size of today's "computer" chips, creating a portable, handheld SDR capable of scanning radio frequencies and decoding digital protocols should be doable. Think about the computer running inside every Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, and other smartphones for the past 20 years. There should be enough computing power in the average smartphone to run SDR software.

And, you don't need a traditional CPU. The Icom SDR radios (IC-7300, IC-7610, IC-9700, IC-705, etc.) use FPGAs to do the computing. And, yes, they are software defined radios in that the incoming RF signal is directly sampled, digitized, and processed.

Commercial handheld SDR transceivers have been around since about 1995 and I have a couple that old. The Uniden SD100 is an SDR and so are many newer amateur and commercial radios. SDR or Software Defined Radio simply means that some or all receiver and some transmitter functions are digitized and things like IF BW, AGC and demodulation or transmit BW and modulation are performed by computer simulation of hardware components. Those functions performed by computer simulation can be changed or upgraded by software or firmware upgrades.

 

[YoShep69]

What are the old PSR500 features that you liked so well? Wondering if I am missing out here.

Manually tune a CC, push store, and a System is created and stored. Granted it is far from complete, but it is a heck of a start.
And of course this also works with the WS1040 / 1065.

Yo

 

[n4jri]

What are the old PSR500 features that you liked so well? Wondering if I am missing out here.

Glad you asked!
1 - Favorites List - you could easily add stuff to it or clear it out while in the field. On the TRX's SKYWARN provides a similar function but isn't as facile or flexible. (Plus, the PSR500 also had SKYWARN in addition to Favorites)
2 - Soft Keys, which allowed quite a few actions to be taken without getting too deep in the menu system. Infinitely friendlier for programming/tweaking in the field.
3 - The ability to include Search and Sweeper ranges as scannable objects, instead of having to choose between being totally in search mode or scan mode. I compensate for this in the TRX by preprograming scanlists for searching, but the PSR-500's versatility made it more flexible in the field with a lot less preparation and hassle.
3A - An additional benefit of the Search Object/Sweeper Object mode is that multiple small or specialized ranges could be stacked together, making searches much more efficient in terms of time consumed, and freedom from interference.
4 - The ability to configure Spectrum Sweeper ranges from the radio itself. If I'm coming up on road construction, I might want to set the sweeper to where the flagmen's walkie-talkies are. If out in sticks, I might want to sweep the UHF air band. This is easily done with just a few keystrokes on the PSR-500. On the TRX, I can't find a way to configure the sweeper ranges except programming them with EZ Scan. On a recent trip to rural eastern NC, my PSR600 in the car was picking up fighter planes on Spectrum Sweeper. This was only possible because I was able to quickly exclude other bands (like 800 MHz) which would've dominated the radio and made the feature useless.

73/Allen (N4JRI)

 

[n4jri]

Manually tune a CC, push store, and a System is created and stored. Granted it is far from complete, but it is a heck of a start.
And of course this also works with the WS1040 / 1065.

Yo

Forgot to add that to my list! AFAIK the TRX's will not display a System ID or anything else that really tells you about the signal, except for its NAC if it's P16 or P25. Reading basic data from a CC should definitely be on the list!

73/Allen (N4JRI)

 

[garys]

Non of that is viable for most scanner hobbyists. The SDS scanners are great radios, but I am not going to build one on my work bench.

That Whistler failed at their attempt should tell you how difficult it is.

If your idea of an "SDR" is a receiver/converter box connected to a Windows or Mac laptop, I think that's an old paradigm. Given the small size of today's "computer" chips, creating a portable, handheld SDR capable of scanning radio frequencies and decoding digital protocols should be doable. Think about the computer running inside every Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, and other smartphones for the past 20 years. There should be enough computing power in the average smartphone to run SDR software.

And, you don't need a traditional CPU. The Icom SDR radios (IC-7300, IC-7610, IC-9700, IC-705, etc.) use FPGAs to do the computing. And, yes, they are software defined radios in that the incoming RF signal is directly sampled, digitized, and processed.

 

[AK9R]

That Whistler failed at their attempt should tell you how difficult it is.

That Uniden succeeded with the SDS twins tells me that it's not impossible.

 

[GTR8000]

That Whistler failed at their attempt should tell you how difficult it is.

Let's be real, Whistler v1 wasn't doing much of anything other than reselling GRE's designs after acquiring them. Little to no actual innovation, except to maybe add a keypad to one or two models iirc? So yeah, comparing their "failed attempt" at the actual work Uniden and Paul Opitz put into designing, engineering, and bringing the SDS models to life is apples and frankfurters. Many of us believe that Whistler's announcement of an SDR based scanner in the works was a lame and failed plot to take away from Uniden's rollout of the SDS series.

Anyway, let's see what (if anything) Whistler v2 brings to the table, or if this is just another rehash of Whistler v1 where they're going to do nothing but continue to sell 20 year old GRE designs as long as it's profitable. There are quite a lot of GRE fanboys who will continue to spend too much money on largely outdated designs, so I'm sure they'll have no trouble moving inventory.

 

[Ubbe]

2 - Soft Keys, which allowed quite a few actions to be taken without getting too deep in the menu system. Infinitely friendlier for programming/tweaking in the field.

But they added quick selection keys, that still have two unused, that allows a quicker way to reach functions deeper in the menu system. Make a suggestion to them for those two free keys to the functions you want and we will see what effort they are willing to devote to it.

TRX-1 Fn Function key Shortcuts

Hello, Is there a complete list of TRX-1 Fn function key shortcuts? In a TRX-2 message I see: I have the following list: •Fn + 0 = Tune mode •Fn + 1 = Scan mode •Fn + 2 = Program Menu •Fn + 3 = Sweeper Menu •Fn + 4 = Service Search Menu •Fn + 5 = Limit Search •Fn + 6 = Playback mode...

forums.radioreference.com

/Ubbe