interesting information!

"Paul Hirose" wrote in message
...
In late May 2004 I bought a PRO-95 over the counter at Radio Shack.
It's the only scanner I've ever owned. I'm generally pleased with it,
and believe I got my money's worth.

Sensitivity is good. Indoors with the stock 6 inch antenna, in my
small Southern California desert community, there's plenty to hear. In
fact, I have to keep some banks and channels turned off or the amount
of chatter would be unbearable.

Its construction seems solid enough, though I haven't drop tested it
yet.

The slippery, small diameter knobs look cheap and feel cheap.

The keyboard is satisfactory. But I think it's almost too small, even
though my fingers are slim. I wish Radio Shack had made the scanner a
little bigger. There'd be room for a more comfortable, spread-out
keyboard and a larger speaker.

Speaking of the speaker, it puts out ample volume for hand-held
listening outdoors. The audio is annoyingly piercing with some female
voices, but I guess that's better than a muddy sound.

I briefly tried the scanner in my car, but found it too distracting
while driving. Not the scanner's fault.

Simultaneous scanning of conventional channels plus EDACS and Motorola
trunked systems works well. Once in a while there's a trunking glitch,
no big deal.

The manual is fairly thorough but poorly organized. Every description
of this scanner I've seen on the net seems to mention the lousy
manual.

In my opinion, the PRO-95's main weakness is its firmware. The user
interface gives me the impression the various functions were
programmed in haphazard fashion by different people who never talked
to each other.

For example, consider the delay setting. For a conventional
(non-trunked) channel you have a choice of either 0 or 2 seconds. I've
found this too short. If the channel goes dead for just 2 seconds, the
PRO-95 loses interest and resumes scanning. It's like watching TV when
someone with a short attention span has the remote control. Yes,
there's a way to manually hold a channel, but it's badly designed.
I'll get to that shortly.

For trunked systems there's a more flexible delay time control. You
can adjust it in .5 second increments from 0 to 4.5 seconds. Though
I'd like an even wider range, it's an improvement. So why are we stuck
with a choice of either 0 or 2 seconds on conventional channels? As I
said, it's as if different people programmed various functions of the
scanner, and there was no coordination between them.

A glaring example of that is the lack of a single button to make the
scanner stop when it comes across something you want to monitor for a
while. In SEARCH mode you press the PAUSE button. But if you're
scanning, you must press MANUAL, unless the signal is on a trunked
system, in which case you press and hold TRUNK for about one second.
If you press MANUAL by mistake, you lose the voice freq and get the
screech of the control channel instead. If you fail to press TRUNK
long enough, you store that talkgroup in memory instead of locking the
scanner on it.

Some of the button-ology gets even more archane than that. Like the
key sequence for changing a trunked bank from open to closed mode,
which I do several times a day. You use MANUAL to access a channel
(any channel) in the trunked bank, then press FUNC, then 5. Talk about
non-intuitive!

The SEARCH function is poorly implemented. Its purpose is sniff out
active frequencies you weren't aware of, right? So why does it stop on
freqs you've already loaded into channels? When SEARCH hits an active
freq, it should stop, check the channels for a match, and if one is
found, automatically move on.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Don't get me wrong; I paid full
retail and believe I got my money's worth. The PRO-95 is a good
beginner's scanner. But it could have been so much better with
well-designed firmware. My second scanner probably won't be from Radio
Shack. I'll give some other company a chance to impress me.

p.s. I have a calculator and a GPS receiver in the same price range as
the PRO-95. Both have serial cables you can connect to your computer
to upgrade the unit's firmware flash ROM. I don't know if the PRO-95
has such capability. You can definitely load it with data, however
(frequencies etc.).

--

Paul Hirose
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