[Scan-DC] Problems Monitoring Montgomery TRS w/ BC-796

[Doug Kitchener]

All,

Recently (last 10 days or so) I've noticed problems when monitoring Montgomery County on my Uniden BC-796 (note that this is a first-generation 800 MHz digital trunking scanner).  If it's locked on a particular talkgroup, am picking up a lot of static, sounds like squelch is open.  Also, am picking up stray transmissions from different talkgroups other than the one that the radio is locked on.

Questions:

1.  Could this possibly be due to this rebanding / narrow-banding business?  Or is Montgomery just having problems?  (No problems noted when I use my newer Radio Shack / GRE PRO-197).  I admit to being 'way behind on that and basically have no idea what's going on with it, who's done it, who has yet to do it, when the deadline is, whether or not there's more than one thing going on, etc. - will have to get busy and read up on it.

2.  I've never done any firmware upgrades to this radio (well, maybe one very early on, I can't remember any more - am checking that out now, but could that also have something to do with this?

There seems to be something that needs to be done in order to be able to enter a custom bandplan that has to do with rebanding - 

http://info.uniden.com/twiki/bin/view/UnidenMan4/BC796DFirmwareUpdate

If I understand this correctly, first "BC_VUP v2.0.0.7" should be installed; then "BC796D_V3_60.scn" - has anyone else done this / had to do this?  Any thoughts, questions, comments, pointers?

Thanks in advance... as I mentioned, I'm digging into this, and will post whatever I find, whenever I find it out, but would appreciate any input, esp from other folks who are using the same radio and / or may have noticed the same things.

Regards,

Doug