wildcard behavior clarification

[kc2kth]

I'm reading through some of the posts here, looking at the ezscan help, and Mark's 1088 manual but still have a question regarding wildcard behavior. Everything i see mentions putting a TG wildcard in each trunked system to catch TGs that haven't been entered into the database yet. Makes sense.

What do I need to do with this wildcard TG entry for scanlists? Should the wildcard be in each scanlist where I'm monitoring that trunked system in order to catch new/unknown TGs? That seems logical to me, assuming I want to find new TGs, but I didn't see anything explicitly stated about adding wildcards to any scanlist except for a post here a few days ago mentioning to put all of the wildcards in scanlist 001 to help when browsing systems.

 

[ebplayer]

I'm new to the TRX-1 personally, and the concept of scanlists was a bit foreign at first. First I tried adding wildcards to each trunked system and then put all those wildcards into their own scanlist. This doesn't seem to work out too well because 1) you're trying to scan all of your trunked systems in one scanlist, so often it seems that transmissions are missed, and 2) you end up seeing every talk group as wild even if you have it programmed for that particular system.

I eventually found the TRX-1 works best by putting each trunked system into it's own scanlist along with it's own wildcard in the same scanlist.

 

[kc2kth]

Thanks for confirming, that's what I thought.

 

[03msc]

Yes, what ebplayer said is what I'd do. And in some cases you may not want to be scanning the wildcard all the time but only when you're wanting to do some discovery. For example, if you were using the scanner while mobile you may prefer to hear only law/fire/ems traffic but when you're at home you may want to have the wildcard active to see what new things you can catch.

 

[AggieCon]

Sorry for the confusion about that....

Definitely, scanning all of the trunked systems at once would lead to a bad experience. Placing the wildcards together is for ease of access to grab an entire trunked system through the browse objects menu.

You would also put the wildcard with the scanlist(s) for that particular system.

Furthermore, you can skip or lockout known and unwanted talkgroups, and the wildcard will not play those.

Next, make sure that you have all known and identified talkgroups imported, even if you do not want to hear them. That way your wildcard will show the alpha tag for known talkgroups.