Hi,
Apologies as this isn't strictly on-topic. But, figured
*some* folks here could provide hints or pointers to other forum...I rescued a handheld scanner with some battery issues. Now that it's working, it seems an interesting "toy" to add to my bug out bag. (I don't have much interest in listening to that sort of sporadic chatter on a daily basis!)
But, I'm clueless as to the most *practical* way of "programming" it. To be clear, I understand how to get the parameters *into* it; rather, I'm curious as to the best way to map those frequencies onto the scanning order, etc.
The device has 10 groups of 10 channel assignments. The first of each can be treated as a "priority" channel (there is a mode that gives preference to monitoring these above the others). Entire groups can be (easily) enabled/disabled. And, individual channels can be disabled (though a bit more work to do this for many channels).
After a bit of thought *imagining* how it might be most useful in an emergency, I think the best approach is to group similar services (from different municipalities, etc.) into each group. E.g., fire in group 1, police in group 2, etc. So, in a given geographical region, you would tend (??) to just be able to pick up one set of services -- and, they would be distributed across multiple groups. This would allow you to easily disable that particular service without affecting other services from that municipality (e.g., wanting to listen to the police chatter without being distracted by activity on the fire channel(s)).
Since there often are several frequencies for each service, you could assign N groups for police traffic, M others for fire, etc. This would afford you the same sort of easy "gating" for those individual channels -- instead of having them compete with each other in the same *group*.
Having neighboring municipalities also present in these same groups (but "out of broadcast range?") would allow you to migrate with the device picking up the *local* services as you move between jurisdictions (without having to manually reprogram or enable/disable new groups for each locality).
[Remember, this sits in my BoB, not on my desk!]Any hams or "casual listeners" who can comment on the utility of various approaches to this?
Thanks!