Pap
Member
I have been trying to contact them for a week now. They don't answer their email, and the phones are disconnected. I'm interested in a 4 level slicer kit. Anyone know where I can get one.
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What Happend To Texax-2Way
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richster
Member
Hi Pap,
Don't be too surprised about Texas2Way not responding to you quickly, like in the same month. They are notorious for that, and if you do a search you will find others who have experienced the same thing.
A friend of mine bought the 4-level slicer from them four years ago. It took them 5 months to get to Saskatchewan Canada from Texas. In that 5 months my friend had tried in vain to contact them to find out what was going on. He even phoned them numerous times, and each time their shipper was "away" or "busy". Each time my freind left a message for the person to call back. They never did. It just finally showed up one day.
The slicer itself is a piece of junk. It was possible my friend got a "lemon", but I don't think so.
It worked on both the 4-level side and 2-level side, but it was very tempermental.
For example on the 2-level side. Running trunker or any other program like that, it was a task in-a-half to keep it going for any length of time. Right away trunker would start decoding a "hi-qual" signal at 95%+, but then after 20 seconds trunker would drop the signal and say "want CTS?". Sometimes it would run for a couple of hours fine, but most of the time it would crap out before a minute.
On the 4-level side, while decoding pager messages that required the 4-level we were noticing that most of the messages were intertwined with giberish. Sometimes it was so bad that that's all that came up was giberish.
I ran slicer.exe and it seemed to be responding, and I was getting around 3000 to 4000 interrupts which I suppose was normal. There is a fancy tuner you can turn on the slicer to change the amount of interupts you got, but no matter what you set it at it basically did the same thing or got waaay worse.
I finally found out what the problem was when I bought a slicer from www.dataslicers.com. With this slicer I was able to run trunker at 100% no problem all the time. Running slicer.exe with the one I bought told me what was wrong, I just never had anything to compare it with.
When I ran slicer.exe on mine I saw 6 or 7 "very distinct" individual bumps on the graph, where as running slicer.exe on the one from Texas2Way looked like a graph of the DOW stock index. :lol:
I was able to determine that this meant that the signal on the Texas2Way slicer was "there" but very "dirty". No wonder we would get giberish and dropouts all the time.
In my opinion, save your money and do not get this slicer. In my experience 4-level pager decoding got boring real fast, and thats all I found the 4-level useful for. MDT decoding is out because they are now in the 1.9 Ghz cellular band. Even if you do find one that's not, it is more likely encrypted.
I suggest you try building one first. Schematics for such a beast can be found on this site here:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/wiki/index.php?title=Data_Slicers
If you don't need a 4-level, and don't want to build yourself, I STRONGLY suggest www.dataslicers.com. I found they even work with LTRTrunk too.
Well that's just my two cents.
*edit* Say I just read through your previous postings and see you already have several slicers already, so disregard my ramblings about dataslicers.com
Just don't get the slicer from Texas2way unless you can "troubleshoot" it's problem. Oh ya!!!!.....also inside the slicer we found Texas2Way had scratched all the indetifying marks off the IC chips, so trying to find a crossreference for the IC's in the ECG manual was a pain.
Now how cheesy is that? I guess Texas2Way don't want people building their own "piece of junk" :lol:
Regards,
Richster.
Don't be too surprised about Texas2Way not responding to you quickly, like in the same month. They are notorious for that, and if you do a search you will find others who have experienced the same thing.
A friend of mine bought the 4-level slicer from them four years ago. It took them 5 months to get to Saskatchewan Canada from Texas. In that 5 months my friend had tried in vain to contact them to find out what was going on. He even phoned them numerous times, and each time their shipper was "away" or "busy". Each time my freind left a message for the person to call back. They never did. It just finally showed up one day.
The slicer itself is a piece of junk. It was possible my friend got a "lemon", but I don't think so.
It worked on both the 4-level side and 2-level side, but it was very tempermental.
For example on the 2-level side. Running trunker or any other program like that, it was a task in-a-half to keep it going for any length of time. Right away trunker would start decoding a "hi-qual" signal at 95%+, but then after 20 seconds trunker would drop the signal and say "want CTS?". Sometimes it would run for a couple of hours fine, but most of the time it would crap out before a minute.
On the 4-level side, while decoding pager messages that required the 4-level we were noticing that most of the messages were intertwined with giberish. Sometimes it was so bad that that's all that came up was giberish.
I ran slicer.exe and it seemed to be responding, and I was getting around 3000 to 4000 interrupts which I suppose was normal. There is a fancy tuner you can turn on the slicer to change the amount of interupts you got, but no matter what you set it at it basically did the same thing or got waaay worse.
I finally found out what the problem was when I bought a slicer from www.dataslicers.com. With this slicer I was able to run trunker at 100% no problem all the time. Running slicer.exe with the one I bought told me what was wrong, I just never had anything to compare it with.
When I ran slicer.exe on mine I saw 6 or 7 "very distinct" individual bumps on the graph, where as running slicer.exe on the one from Texas2Way looked like a graph of the DOW stock index. :lol:
I was able to determine that this meant that the signal on the Texas2Way slicer was "there" but very "dirty". No wonder we would get giberish and dropouts all the time.
In my opinion, save your money and do not get this slicer. In my experience 4-level pager decoding got boring real fast, and thats all I found the 4-level useful for. MDT decoding is out because they are now in the 1.9 Ghz cellular band. Even if you do find one that's not, it is more likely encrypted.
I suggest you try building one first. Schematics for such a beast can be found on this site here:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/wiki/index.php?title=Data_Slicers
If you don't need a 4-level, and don't want to build yourself, I STRONGLY suggest www.dataslicers.com. I found they even work with LTRTrunk too.
Well that's just my two cents.
*edit* Say I just read through your previous postings and see you already have several slicers already, so disregard my ramblings about dataslicers.com
Just don't get the slicer from Texas2way unless you can "troubleshoot" it's problem. Oh ya!!!!.....also inside the slicer we found Texas2Way had scratched all the indetifying marks off the IC chips, so trying to find a crossreference for the IC's in the ECG manual was a pain. Now how cheesy is that? I guess Texas2Way don't want people building their own "piece of junk" :lol:
Regards,
Richster.
Pap
Member
Thanks Richster. Yes I do have the slicer from Data Slicer and it works great. I also have several I built from this site including Three 4 level's. They also work great. But a Friend of mine wanted me to get this one for him. Right now he's using one of mine. But thank's for the Info.
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