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#1
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PRO-95 good choice?
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 To reply by email delete INVALID from address. |
#2
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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 To reply by email delete INVALID from address. |
#3
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#4
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I can add a couple of annoyances. Frequency steps can't be changed except
in trunking mode. It always defaults to the pre-programmed frequency which may not be exactly the freq. I need. And you can't lockout group ID numbers in the open mode, like you can in the Pro-91, which is crucial for searching for and finding new group numbers. It keeps locking up on the data group ID in the open mode. |
#5
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I can add a couple of annoyances. Frequency steps can't be changed except
in trunking mode. It always defaults to the pre-programmed frequency which may not be exactly the freq. I need. And you can't lockout group ID numbers in the open mode, like you can in the Pro-91, which is crucial for searching for and finding new group numbers. It keeps locking up on the data group ID in the open mode. |
#6
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