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Freescan Tips

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Revision as of 09:51, 29 June 2012 by Plaws (talk | contribs) (A little clearer)

Limits

The BCD996T & BCT15 scanners have a TGID Limit of 250 TGIDs per trunk system. The BC246T/BR330T/BCD396T scanner have a 200 TGID limit. For the BCD396XT, the limit is 500 TGIDs. FreeSCAN will store more than this number in memory, however the scanner will only take a limited number during upload.

Multi-site

FreeSCAN supports the BCD996T/BCT15/BCD396XT/BC346XT feature of having multiple trunk sites in one system. This feature is not supported in the 246/330/396T. Starting with version 0.8, when you upload a multisite system to single-site scanner, FreeSCAN will create a system in the scanner for every site in the system being uploaded. TGID groups will be duplicated across every system in the scanner. Use this feature with caution because you can quickly run out of scanner memory.

Alert Lights & Colours

For XT scanners, to assign a alert light to a channel, select a colour for it first, other then "Off". Even if you only have a monochrome display, you need to select a colour other then Off, or else the alert light is considered to be "Off" regardless of flash pattern.

iCall

iCall wildcards can be entered in FreeSCAN by creating a TGID channel with the TGID being set to i0 .This works with all scanners supported by FreeSCAN. You do need to create one for every system you wish to monitor for iCalls without being in ID Search mode.

Operating Outside North America

In some countries, you may notice that all your frequencies get rounded off. For example, 152.6250 becomes 152.0000. This can happen during either uploading or downloading. The reason is because different local standards define the period as being a comma in some cases, and because of the role commas play in the programming of these scanners, frequencies become cut off at the decimal point. To work around this, goto Control Panel and open up Regional Settings. Click on Customize and change the decimal symbol to a period. Restart FreeScan for changes to take effect.

P25 system in an analog radio

FreeSCAN will not allow you to upload a fully digital P25 system to an analog scanner since these scanners have no chance of being able to track these systems. Attempting to upload a P25 system to an analog scanner might lead to errors.

Most recently downloaded

When you bring up the download window, it will preserve the system names of previous detected systems. If you have made any changes whatsoever to your scanner's programming since last bringing up this list, you should reclick on Queue System List before downloading. This is because the system index IDs will shift around inside the scanner's memory when you make changes, and if FreeSCAN doesn't get an updates list then it will not be able to download the systems.

System types

The new BCD396XT has introduced a new system type, P25 Standard. In older digital scanner this was known as Motorola Type II / P25 and is considered a different system type. Prior to version 0.8E, uploading an unsupported system (such as a Type II P25 to a 396XT) would result in that system being untrackable. However, 0.8E and above will change the system types for you to be compatible with your scanner. This allows you to, for example, download from a 996T and upload directly to a 396XT.

GPS

Speaking of transferring between different scanner, the user should be aware of GPS differences. The 15 & 996T track GPS either by conventional system, or by trunk site. On the XT scanners, GPS is tracked by conventional group. As a result, transferring in between the two scanners for conventional systems will mean GPS settings will be lost unless the user edits the correct settings in prior to uploading.

In addition, the XT series scanners support GPS by TGID and conventional groups, unlike the 15/996T. Uploading from an XT to a 15/996T would therefore cause this information to not be retained by the scanner.

File Formats

In order to support the many new features in the XT scanners, the file format has been changed in .7B. You can still load all of your old files, however, files saved with this version cannot be opened with previous versions.


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