[Scan-DC] Problem with Arlington County P25 system on Uniden 346XT

[Andrew Clegg]

All,

You may be on to something. I turned the scanner off and back on in its default location, and that didn't help. I moved the scanner around the apartment, and that didn't help either. Then I had the brilliant idea of moving the scanner, then turning it off and back on, and that did it! So it does seem to have something to do with location. So maybe when the control channel is changed, there is interference between the sites, and the scanner isn't able to lock on. It has to be relocated and rebooted. Then it can be put in its original place and it will be happy. I need to look into the firmware update that might help with the decoding. 

Thanks.

Andy

Typos courtesy of my iphone

On Nov 24, 2013, at 18:38, Greg Danes <danesgs1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> That sounds about right to me. But what do I know :)
> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Mike Agner <ka3jjz at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> Well there's one really simple answer here - the 346XT can't handle P25 -
>> it's an analog only scanner. Now if you mean the 396XT, that's a horse of
>> 'nother color.....
>> 
>> Be that as it may, that system is simulcast - and if it's using LSM like
>> so many systems that are popping up lately, the current crop of digital
>> scanners is going to have problems decoding it
>> well. The wiki at RR has a very detailed article on this very subject
>> 
>> http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Simulcast_digital_distortion
>> 
>> This is an issue very familiar to folks wanting to listen to Baltimore
>> city or Baltimore county. As an example when I drove up to Woodlawn where I
>> used to work, I had to make sure my attenuator
>> was on, as I was receiving sigs from at least 3 towers at the same time
>> (this is on a 396T).  It wasn't real clear all the time, but it worked -
>> mostly.
>> 
>> Now there was a firmware upgrade to the 396XT that supposedly improved LSM
>> decoding...
>> 
>> http://info.uniden.com/twiki/pub/publish/BCD396XTFirmwareUpdate.html
>> 
>> Be sure to try to use the settings as defined in version 1.-06 first. You
>> should know that it's a very catch as catch can type thing. One set of
>> settings might work well for one person, not so well for another. It's
>> virtually impossible to quantify simply because the RF environment can be
>> completely different for each (one might be using his radio mobile with a
>> duckie, another with a gain 800 Mhz antenna in a fixed
>> location...yada...yada...). You're going to have to fiddle with it a lot,
>> and accept the compromise performance.
>> 
>> And then there's this...
>> 
>> http://forums.radioreference.com/uniden-scanners/267424-
>> loose-open-squelch-improves-lsm-simulcast-reception.html
>> 
>> Are there any real solutions? Probably not until the scanner manufacturers
>> (now just Uniden, and Whistler now that GRE is out) develop new firmware
>> that can properly handle the distortion issue and LSM.  And before anyone
>> asks, I have no idea whether the new 436/536 will handle this either. I
>> suspect that the folks that are lucky enough to do beta testing signed NDAs
>> to prevent them from talking about technical issues in public.
>> 
>> Not the answer everyone wants to hear, but the only one available, I'm
>> afraid...Mike
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Gregory S Danes
> 8101 Orville st.
> Alexandria, VA 22309
> danesgs1 at gmail.com
> Phone. 571-216-2126
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