PortableScannerTrouble

Just a heads up about portable scanners...

I was reminded again that many portable scanners incorporate the battery saving technique of only turning on the receiver section every few seconds to see if there is carrier. This generally works fine for listening to people talk as you only lose a small part of the conversation and can infer what was said. Not so with data.

A way to tell if your scanner does this (besides the manual) is to put in a normally idle freq in manual mode, plug your discriminator into your sound card, and un-mute the Line-In playback mixer channel. Simmer for 10 minutes. If after a period of time you still hear the continuous rush of open squelch noise, you are either OK or there is a strong enough signal on the freq to keep the battery-saver from kicking in. If you hear regular bursts of noise between complete silence, you have battery-saver.

Workarounds: * Leave your squelch knob cranked wide open. Volume can be turned all the way down so you don't hear it. * Instead of setting the scanner to the manual channel, set it in scan mode and lock out all other channels in the bank. Battery-save won't engage in scan mode.

My Uniden trunktrackers do this even though they are plugged into a 12V external supply. Found out my Pro-2067 scanner does it too, even though it's a mobile/base. Of course when you open it up, it becomes obvious that the boards are the same used in the portable version!

Comments/Questions

-- GaryHahn - 31 Aug 2008