Beyond the Basics
public safety communications technology. Digital modulation typically provides a clear distortion free audio signal throughout the service area of the system you are monitoring. However, there are some important differences between analog and digital voice preformance that you should be aware of while scanning. In most cases, digital voice transmissions will be surprisingly crisp and clear, and without noise or distoriton, even when corresponding analog siganls from the same system contain some static. However, if you are in a location with marginal reception, you may find that the voice quality of digital signals deteriorates very rapidly, resulting in missing syllables or entire words. If this happens, try reorienting the scanner or antenna for better reception. You may also try pressing the ATT key and apply attenuation to reduce the overload effects of nearby strong transmitters. Under certain very weak digital signal conditions, the scanner may lose synchronization with the digital signal and briefly revert to analog FM, resulting in the reception of the raw, undecoded digital signal. This is a normal indication of a digitral signal that is too weak to decode.
Frequency – the receiving signal location (expressed in MHz). To find active frequencies, you can use frequency guides available from your local RadioShack store, frequency listings posted on the Internet, or the
Search Banks – contain preprogrammed frequencies in the scanner’s memory. Your scanner has six preprogrammed search banks configured to search various radio services, and one limit search bank that you can configure. You can set the lower and higher frequency limit in the limit search bank. For example, if you wanted to find active frequencies between a range of 150.1000 and 150.5000, you would put both of those frequencies in the limit search bank. You can even change the frequency range in a search bank (SR6) to customize your search parameters.
Talkgroup IDs – Each channel storage bank has an associated talkgroup ID list, for a total of 10 talkgroup ID lists. Each ID list has five
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