[Scan-DC] Uniden Digital Scanners Pricing/Availability

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 20:28:03 -0500

They Have-

The only problem is the royalties attached are a little steep. So no public release yet.

Justin D Osborn wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, John Antonelli wrote:
>
> > Folks, unless you are in an area that is digital, I say wait
> > a bit and let em work the bugs out and perhaps get away from
> > this add on card feature
> >
> What I don't understand, is why somebody hasn't written software to do the
> digital decoding, or hacked a digital radio apart and come up with some
> sort of software solution.
>
> The new digital systems have the same control scheme as the analog
> trunking systems, the radios just digitally encode the audio stream
> before they send it.  This means that any of us with a semi-recent
> trunktracking scanners can track a digital system, we'll just hear the
> audio as digital noise.
>
> So there are two options:
>
> 1) Hook up the audio output of the scanner to a computer and write
> software to decode it.  This is probably the least expensive
> option.  That's the way people used to scan trunking systems before
> trunktracking scanners.  Get a regular scanner, have it scan the control
> channel and have the audio hooked up to a computer.  Have the computer
> decode the control channel, and then have the computer tune a computer
> controlled scanner to the proper channel.
>
> Main problem:  The APCO-25 standard isn't proprietary, but they want $600
> for the design papers.  So we'd need a group of people that have some
> digital audio programming experience, and maybe we could all pitch in to
> pay for the specs.
>
> 2) I'm guessing that since the control scheme hasn't changed, the radios
> really haven't changed much either.  What I'm guessing is:  whatever the
> analog radios are like now, the digital radios are exactly the same, with
> the addition of two chips.  They've gotta have one chip that takes the
> analog audio stream and converts it to the actual digital data.  Then
> there's a chip that takes the digital data, decodes it, and turns it into
> the analog stream.  So if somebody has a digital radio, we could take it
> apart and see what the chip design is like.
>
> Main problem:  I don't know enough about EE yet.  Also, it's possible they
> could've completely redone the radios and all the processing is on one
> chip.  But if you go to the hardware route, you could make a small
> attachment for the scanner, and you could still have them be portable.
>
> There's a third option that a friend of mine suggested, which would be to
> reprogram one of the new radios on the fly.  Apparently they have some
> sort of computer programming port so that they can be programmed with
> frequencies and talkgroups.  He figured it'd be easier to reverse engineer
> the programming protocol than the digital encoding.  The problem is that
> you'd need to get a digital radio, which are probably more expensive than
> the Uniden scanner/card combination combined.
>
> I'd be in favor of the software solution, that way anybody with a computer
> could listen, and the software might even be ported to a Palm/Pocket PC
> device, allowing for portability again.
>
> Does anybody know why people aren't working on decoder software or
> hardware projects?  I think for most of us, paying $600 for a new scanner
> isn't really an option...and I don't feel like waiting for years for
> prices to go down.
>
> Justin
>
> --
> Justin Osborn                         "Empty are the musings
> University of Maryland                   And wasted are the days
> Class of '05                               You said you were only waiting
> [email protected]                         Famous last words"
> lunokhod.student.umd.edu                           -- Jars of Clay
>
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