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Working with Scanners with Secure Digital (SD) Cards

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Welcome to the Working with Scanners with Secure Digital (SD) Cards article. This article should be a repository for hints, tips, known issues and fixes regarding the use, formatting, loading and other issues that involve SD cards that are used in the following scanners:


GRE Radio Shack Uniden Whistler
PSR-700 Pro-18 HP-1 WS1080
PSR-800 Pro-107 HP-2 WS1088
Pro-668 BCD436HP WS1095
Pro-668 BCD536HP WS1098
TRX-1
TRX-2

If a particular tip is specific to a particular model, please be sure to mention that in the description. Details Matter - the more details you supply, the better this article will become.


General Tips and Information

  • Many of you have questions about Boot/Load times of the Whistler SD card scanners
    • At boot, the code looks through the entire File Allocation Table, counting “free” clusters. This is necessary so that we know how much free space is available on the card at startup. The number of clusters that must be counted is directly related to the size of the card. As a result, a change in card capacity at a minimum will impact the “Init SD FileSys” time. In addition to card size, the “Verifying Data” time is dependent on the usage of the card and is heavily dependent on file system fragmentation, used space, etc.


  • My SD Card has failed or I want to replace it with a larger capacity second memory card. What SD Cards are compatible?
  • How do I format a SD Card for Use?
    • Some microSD cards up to 32GB are supported, as long as it uses 512-byte blocks and is formatted correctly:
      • 2GB or smaller: FAT16, 32kB clusters
      • larger than 2GB: FAT32, 32kB clusters
    • SanDisk and Transcend cards from Class 2 to 6 and up to 32 GB are known to work correctly. Some 4 GB PNY cards have worked while others have not. Other brands have been known to cause issues and could not be recognized by the PSR-800.
    • Larger capacity memory cards (16-32 GB) have been reported to take longer for the PSR-800 to read, boot up and become operational.
    • The SD association recommends using their SD memory card format tool. They say Windows does not properly format SD cards. Their tool can be found here