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Uniden Has Manufactured the Industry’s First GPS-Enabled Scanner
New Mobile Model Features Close Call™ Technology and APCO 25 Capability In a Desktop Design
Uniden America Corporation, a leading manufacturer of wireless consumer electronics manufactures the Bearcat BCD996T. This model introduces the first-ever GPS-enabled scanner, allowing the product to automatically select nearby radio systems for scanning. The BCD996T also offers APCO 25 digital capability, allowing consumers to monitor the activities and signals of city and government service departments, and features advanced scanner technology in an in-dash or mobile mount design.
The GPS-enabled feature offered by the BCD996T provides automatic system selection, which permits the scanner to turn system reception on or off depending on the user’s location, and allows the user to define the scanner display to show location-based information.
In addition, when a GPS unit, not included with this scanner, is connected to the BCD996T, it will alert at areas of special interest, such as dangerous intersections, school zones, or general points of interest.
Featuring APCO 25 capability, Uniden’s BCD996T is poised to further enhance Uniden’s offerings to public safety and increase interoperability between agencies using different types of radio systems. Uniden’s BCD996T will not permit users to monitor sensitive, encrypted signals from national and local security services.
The Bearcat BCD996T also offers Close Call™ RF Capture Technology, Dynamic Memory Management, Fire Tone-Out, and Multi-site programming as well as 6,000 channels and a frequency range of 25 MHz to 1.3 GHz (excluding cellular and UHF TV frequencies). The BCD996T is the first GPS-enabled model in the scanner
With the release of the scanner, the radioreference.com database (RRDB) will have the ability to store the Lat/Long/Range settings for conventional subcategories and trunked system sites.
* Rebanding Supported
The scanner will not include a GPS Receiver, an add-on GPS receiver will be required. Users will be able to define a LAT/LONG centerpoint for any system (conventional or trunked) and a range (in miles) that specifies the radius of a circle that specifies where to turn the system on/off.
industry, is another milestone in the evolution of scanning," said Paul Opitz, product manager at Uniden America Corporation. "These new features will provide an efficient way for agencies that need compatibility in multiple geographic areas to use the scanner without having to reprogram the equipment for each location."
Some wide coverage systems use multiple system sites that are linked together to provide extended area coverage. Each site operates on its own set of frequencies, but share talk group channels with all other sites in the system.
Normally, a site will only carry traffic for talk groups that have at least one subscriber unit (mobile radio) affiliated with it.
With the initial implementation of dynamic memory, each site needed to be entered as its own system, and all talk group channels had to be duplicated. This resulted in more complexity in programming as well as more memory usage.
Multi-Site Trunking is available for Motorola and EDACS system. With this method, you define a system, one or more sites for the system, and then the channels for the system. All channels are shared among all sites.
Here's an outline of a Multi-Site System:
System
System Attributes
Site
Frequencies
Other Attributes
Site
Frequencies
Other Attributes
Channel Group
Channel Group Attributes
Channel
Channel Attributes
Channel
Channel Attributes
Channel Group
Channel Group Attributes
Channel
Channel Attributes
Channel
Channel Attributes
The only System attribute is the system name. This tag is never displayed, but makes the system easy to find for programming updates.
Site attributes include:
Pressing L/O one time while on a channel temporarily locks out that channel. Pressing F+L/O one time while on a system temporarily locks out that system.
Pressing L/O or F+L/O two times results in a permanent lockout. Pressing L/O for more than 3 seconds unlocks all channels in the current system (or all search lockouts if in a search). F+L/O for more than 3 seconds unlocks all systems.
Temporary lockouts are removed when power is cycled.
Pressing a number button while powering on the scanner automatically unlocks all systems assigned to that startup key and automatically locks all systems assigned to a different startup key (unassigned systems are not affected).
If you connect a GPS unit to the scanner, it can automatically enable/disable systems based on the geographic information you provide:
Rather than center the lat/lon on the antenna site for the system and set the range to the receivable range for the system, it makes more sense to center these settings on the geopolitical center of the system, and bound the range to encircle that entity. That is, while I can technically hear the Arlington TRS from west Fort Worth, I don’t really want to. Instead, I’d set the lat/lon/range values to approximate a circle around the Arlington city limits so that I would not hear Arlington until I approached/entered Arlington.
Also, not all geopolitical areas are perfect circles. You can modify the shape of the system by entering multiple sites for the system (even though the system might have only one site) and use different location settings for each site. For example, stack two circles to make a tall, narrow scan area for the system.
There are non-radio type systems that hold other location based information:
In general, a location alert can have:
Alerts are based on:
The user can quickly save a location by pressing GPS. Scanner prompts for the type of location to store (Speed, Intersection, or POI).
Close Call Do-Not-Disturb
When set in this mode, the scanner will periodically make Close Call checks whenever the scanner is not receiving audio in another mode. This eliminates the annoying breaks in conversation while still allowing for the Close Call functionality.
Let you program the keypad’s secondary functions to turn on/off specified search ranges.
Lets you choose either red or green backlighting for the display/keypad.
Tap Function to access F+ key presses. 5 seconds after your last key press, the scanner reverts to non F+ entry (or press Function again to revert sooner).
When this option is turned on, when the scanner gets a Close Call "hit", it temporarily saves the hit and includes that frequency when scanning. The scanner keeps the last 10 hits (older hits are erased by newer ones). Hits are lost when power is cycled. You can store a hit into memory by pressing "E" when on that frequency.
Lets you display extended GPS information like:
Front-set serial port using the same connector as BC246T/BCD396T/BR330T/SC230. Rear DB9 Male connector (for convenient direct plug-in of GPS Serial cable).
Either port can be configured to be PC interface or GPS interface.
Free UASD software (compatible with other versions of UASD) is available by download at http://www.uniden.com