The purpose of this thread is to gather any feature requests that people may be looking for on the Whistler WS1080 and WS1088 scanners. Feel free to add your wish list below. I've already sent mine request to Whistler tech support for consideration.
I started a thread over in the general area, mostly directed toward Uniden since that is what I currently own, but DON'T bother using very often because the interface is just too difficult for the most part. You can read the thread, just skip the folks "attacking me" for asking/searching for a new feature I need and require in order to use a scanner.
http://forums.radioreference.com/general-scanning-discussion/347118-easier-use-scanner-3.html
Or just read this summary of what I am looking for. It seems Uniden has no interest in adding it. Whistler had this feature (or something similar) in the WS140, but apparently didn't include it on the WS1088. Perhaps they can consider adding it to the next firmware release.
Synopsys:
I live on Long Island, NY which is a fairly congested place. There are 100's if not 1000's of towns and villages, each with it's own FD, PD, Public safety, marine police, village utilities, plows, road crews.... we are also surrounded by water so we have many marine PD, CG's, town marine units.... Suffice it to say I have between 5000 and 6000 frequencies and talkgroups that I utilize/maintain in my scanner. 90% of these I rarely listen to. Normally I have a scanlist of my local PD, local FD, ambulance co.... and a few special interest things I listen to and simply scan that. No problems there.
The problem comes in when something occurs on one of these other towns or villages. Lets say a small plane crashes in a small town 20 miles from me. The village is on the same system and repeaters as my local town, so receptions is perfect. But the problem is, I can't find this little towns freq's in the midst of the other 6000 objects. I of course can't remember them all, or remember shortcut keys to all of them. So the only way I can get to them now is fire up my computer, look them up in my db, figure out where I stored them and then try and remember the ridiculous keystrokes required to get to that particular memory location. So I usually miss the event by the time I get everything fired up and tuned in...
Solution, add a TEXT Search to the scanner. Allow us to simply search for text in our text tags of all objects in memory. Similar to how you find a contact on your smart phone. You type "mar" and you get a list of Maria, Mary, Mark.... to select from. You select the one you want, and then call them. In this case, we select the Frequency or talkgroup and then tune to it and listen. That's it, easy as pie!
Now when a plane crashes in some obscure town or village, I can just type in a few letters of the village and get a list of objects in that village and select the one or ones I want and listen to them. Man would this make life easy!!!
I actually find it hard to believe this isn't standard on ALL scanners today. The way the interfaces are designed, we are forced to use scanners as if it were 1980 again. There's very little difference between todays scanner interfaces, and the interfaces we had 30+ years ago. They added more memory, digital trunk services, and some automation to help with programming and that is it. Not much if any progress on the usability side of scanners. Compare this to a phone. The way we use scanners today is equivalent to having to store all your contacts on your iPhone in memory locations, and remember each ones memory location instead of being given the ability to search by name/text. Instead of finding "Marks" phone number by typing "MAR" in contacts, you would be asked to Press [Call], [.] then enter in the memory number such as [137] to bring up "Marks" contact info. Sounds ridiculous right? Well, that is what we are doing on scanners essentially.
It's time we start making some progress on the usability side of scanners!
I started a thread over in the general area, mostly directed toward Uniden since that is what I currently own, but DON'T bother using very often because the interface is just too difficult for the most part. You can read the thread, just skip the folks "attacking me" for asking/searching for a new feature I need and require in order to use a scanner.
http://forums.radioreference.com/general-scanning-discussion/347118-easier-use-scanner-3.html
Or just read this summary of what I am looking for. It seems Uniden has no interest in adding it. Whistler had this feature (or something similar) in the WS140, but apparently didn't include it on the WS1088. Perhaps they can consider adding it to the next firmware release.
Synopsys:
I live on Long Island, NY which is a fairly congested place. There are 100's if not 1000's of towns and villages, each with it's own FD, PD, Public safety, marine police, village utilities, plows, road crews.... we are also surrounded by water so we have many marine PD, CG's, town marine units.... Suffice it to say I have between 5000 and 6000 frequencies and talkgroups that I utilize/maintain in my scanner. 90% of these I rarely listen to. Normally I have a scanlist of my local PD, local FD, ambulance co.... and a few special interest things I listen to and simply scan that. No problems there.
The problem comes in when something occurs on one of these other towns or villages. Lets say a small plane crashes in a small town 20 miles from me. The village is on the same system and repeaters as my local town, so receptions is perfect. But the problem is, I can't find this little towns freq's in the midst of the other 6000 objects. I of course can't remember them all, or remember shortcut keys to all of them. So the only way I can get to them now is fire up my computer, look them up in my db, figure out where I stored them and then try and remember the ridiculous keystrokes required to get to that particular memory location. So I usually miss the event by the time I get everything fired up and tuned in...
Solution, add a TEXT Search to the scanner. Allow us to simply search for text in our text tags of all objects in memory. Similar to how you find a contact on your smart phone. You type "mar" and you get a list of Maria, Mary, Mark.... to select from. You select the one you want, and then call them. In this case, we select the Frequency or talkgroup and then tune to it and listen. That's it, easy as pie!
Now when a plane crashes in some obscure town or village, I can just type in a few letters of the village and get a list of objects in that village and select the one or ones I want and listen to them. Man would this make life easy!!!
I actually find it hard to believe this isn't standard on ALL scanners today. The way the interfaces are designed, we are forced to use scanners as if it were 1980 again. There's very little difference between todays scanner interfaces, and the interfaces we had 30+ years ago. They added more memory, digital trunk services, and some automation to help with programming and that is it. Not much if any progress on the usability side of scanners. Compare this to a phone. The way we use scanners today is equivalent to having to store all your contacts on your iPhone in memory locations, and remember each ones memory location instead of being given the ability to search by name/text. Instead of finding "Marks" phone number by typing "MAR" in contacts, you would be asked to Press [Call], [.] then enter in the memory number such as [137] to bring up "Marks" contact info. Sounds ridiculous right? Well, that is what we are doing on scanners essentially.
It's time we start making some progress on the usability side of scanners!