PRO-92 Review

Review of the PRO-92 by DV

I have to say, I didn't expect to find a scanner without control channel trunking, at least for Motorola systems. GRE found a way though, and the PRO-92 was what came of it.

The PRO-92 was Radioshack's dive into EDACS and LTR trunking, and their first Motorola trunktracker not made by Uniden, instead made by GRE. It also brought a full fledged LCD screen with dot matrix instead of the older 7 segment display with text as their own segments.

The first thing we should talk about is physical attributes. The radio is basically a big gray brick, the bottom part is about as thick as a WS1040. It stands taller than the WS1040 by a bit, and it also is heavier than the WS1040 because of the 6 AA batteries it requires. It's good on battery life though, it definitely doesn't draw much current. When you're in manual mode parked on a channel it will go into a power save mode when no carrier is detected for about 5 seconds, and it checks for activity about every 2 seconds after that. It's not the most desirable, and programming a single channel you want to monitor into a bank of its own will give you instant response, but less battery life. It lasts a few days with constant monitoring, besides being shut off at night.

The audio is pretty decent sounding as well, it's easy to hear what people are saying, and it doesn't distort super easily. I had to turn it up to about 70% in order for it to start distorting, and at full volume it was super loud. Probably not great for the speaker or your ears if you let it sit all the way up, but to each their own.

Programming the radio is decently easy by hand, you press program, enter your frequency, text, and PL/DPL tones if desired. You can also hook it up to a computer and use software like Win92 to program it. It also allows you to change the button beep tone, add additional search ranges, change the welcome screen, and a lot more you can't do from the radio. The data transfer rate is pretty slow, but given that it was the first (?) Radioshack scanner with computer programming, it's understandable. The format might just have a lot of overhead as well.

Receiver sensitivity on the PRO-92 is alright. It's definitely not as sensitive as newer scanners such as the WS1040, but it does still hold up pretty decent. The stock antenna has some decent gain on it, I seem to get better reception using that than my WS1040 antenna for example. PL/DPL tone decoding is FAST, PL tones pop up within about a quarter of a second and DPL codes decode in about a half to 3/4 of a second. One thing I want to bring to your attention is the fact that the scanner is NOT narrowbanded. You will get trashed with interference from strong stations near your desired frequency. For example, stations that are 15kHz apart (156.000 and 156.015 for simplicity's sake) will bleed into each other, especially if they are strong. The top of the receive bandwidth for 156.000 is 156.0125, so it is well within the 12.5 kHz bandwidth required for narrowband channels. This is easily remedied with PL/DPL tones, but is still annoying nonetheless.

Another thing is the screen. The text is big. Like really big. That means you have less room to put stuff. The PRO-92 houses a 12 character by 4 line display. To a user familiar with modern 16 character alpha tags, this is a lot of real estate to lose out on. You have a lot of abbreviating to do with the PRO-92. In addition, setting a PL or DPL tone swaps the bank tag for the tone. You either need to memorize what agency uses what PL tone, or use even more abbreviations in your alpha tags. The backlight is quite dim, however, the green color is pleasing. It's good enough in darker environments, and the display is readable without it with some form of lighting. There's also no way to make it hold the backlight on.

Trunking on this radio is a bit different than others. Both Motorola and LTR have their own quirks.

In the original release of the PRO-92, Motorola systems were tracked solely by the subaudible datastream contained in the voice channels. It did not use the control channel at all until the A version, which required a bandplan to calculate what frequency corresponded to the LCN the control channel was broadcasting. The bandplan is hard coded into ROM, so it cannot be updated to use rebanded or splintered systems. The original release only requires the new rebanded frequencies for Motorola systems. I have not yet gotten a chance to use it on a Motorola system.

EDACS does use the control channel, but since the frequencies are arbitrarily assigned and does not follow a bandplan, it should work just fine. I have not yet gotten a chance to use it on EDACS systems.

I did use it on LTR systems and it works great. The subaudible decoder circuitry is definitely well engineered and the speed is needed for LTR. LTR systems do not need to be in LCN order, and multiple systems can be in one bank provided that they either don't have duplicate talkgroups or you don't save talkgroups to the radio.

The weather alert feature is also pretty nice, weather standby locks the keypad though, and the siren goes on forever instead of shutting off after 8 seconds or so. It responds quickly to the SAME header, going off almost immediately after the first one is broadcast. The siren is the same for every alert level, so discerning the importance of the alert just by hearing the siren is not possible with this radio. It also contains the older (pre-2004) SAME alert code tables, which will not display the newer alert codes as their proper names but just as "Tune to TV or Radio". There is also no way to set a FIPS code, so it will go off for every alert it hears. In WX Standby mode or in WX Priority mode, it will also respond to the 1050Hz tone used in conjunction with the SAME header or on its own for less important alerts or extensions.

All in all, it's a pretty solid radio, and for it being a first for GRE, you can't knock it too much. It was the only LTR capable scanner from Radioshack from 1999 to 2005 when the Pro-97 was launched. It brought a lot to the table at the time, and its design language was used in the PRO-93, PRO-95, and PRO-96. I would give the radio an 8/10, it's got a few problems but it's smooth as glass once you get it all sorted out. However, it's becoming less practical because of the lack of digital. If you have analog Motorola or EDACS systems or you want to monitor LTR, this radio is a good pick for that.