I bet you will not hear back either, as I doubt they truly care. most companies do not care except ken wood, icon and apple.
Michael Thurman
[log in to unmask]
On Aug 13, 2014, at 1:23 PM, Jim Gammon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Martin and all interested. I posted some emails to the list
> about Whistler Group making their new trunked scanners
> accessible. This is important because Whistler bought the GRE
> America PSR scanners when GRE went out of business. Currently,
> Whistler has introduced a scanner very similar to the PSR500
> handheld scanner but the speaker is below the keypad rather then
> above it. In any case, Whistler has plans to introduce new
> scanners which is why I approached them about adding a series of
> beeps at the very least, or at best, adding a plug like Kenwood
> has in their rigs so people can buy speech boards to make their
> scanners way more accessible. I talked to a lady named Sheri
> Nolan in customer service who told me to write up my ideas and
> send them to her then she in turn, would forward them to the
> company engineers in Ma. They are responsible for designing the
> new scanners. That's obviously where the universal design, or
> access needs to be introduced, from the ground up. In my first
> email to her, I had put some questions that I originally had
> posed to GRE America about their PSR500. I didn't expect
> answers, just thought they might like to see some of the problems
> I was facing with that scanner. What did they do? They wrote me
> back with information from the manual that was supposed to answer
> my questions. This included remarks like, just go to the menus
> and scroll through them until you get to the one you need. Of
> course I'm para-phrasing, but clearly, the engineers did not get
> what I was trying to explain. After getting that email from
> Sheri, I wrote back suggesting that the engineers take their
> handheld scanner and just put some tape over the display and see
> if they can figure out some work-arounds so they can use it
> without seeing the display. She thought that was a good idea and
> sent it on to them. So far, I haven't heard back. I hope that
> those of you who are interested would also give input to the
> Whistler Group by writing email to Sheri Nolan who's email
> [log in to unmask] I recommend trying to keep focused
> particularly on accessibility issues for their scanners and
> emphasize that there are many people with low or no vision who
> would really appreciate it if they would incorporate speech
> output or at least a series of different beeps in their up-coming
> scanners. I for one, would like a handheld scanner with onboard
> accessibility where you don't have to drag a laptop around in
> order to achieve some degree of access. 73, Jim WA6EKS
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Martin G. McCormick" <[log in to unmask]
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Date sent: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:14:28 -0500
>> Subject: Re: accessible scanners
>
>> Another useful feature is when one can communicate with
>> a scanner or transceiver via serial interface. I have two Uniden
>> scanners. One is now eleven years old and has a rather turse
>> command set that one can access via a terminal program much the
>> way you can access one of the old telephone dial-up modems. All
>> the characters must be upper case and all the replies are also
>> in upper case but you can read the display, setup trunking
>> systems, etc. The only problem is that the Motorola SmartZone
>> trunking is now unusable since the new rebanded frequency plans
>> can not be fed in to the scanner as a flash upgrade since the
>> bc780 does not have that capability.
>> It is, however, accessible since the command set and
>> responses are all plain ASCII text.
>> That sort of access is much appreciated. I also have
>> another Uniden which was made around 2008. It does P25 and the
>> new rebanded Motorola trunking just fine.
>> It also has an ASCII command set and is potentially
>> totally accessible but one needs to either be running one of the
>> Windows programs that talk to your scanner or you must be
>> willing to write your own communications program in C or perl. I
>> am a Linux user so that is kind of par for the course.
>> For the BCD996 and the BCD396, the commands and
>> responses are still ASCII but they use CSV or Comma-Separated
>> Variable strings. These are sometimes hugely long lines of text
>> in which each field is separated from it's neighbors by a , so a
>> string for input or output might look like
>> 1,01453500,1,,,3,2,7,K5SRC Stillwater Repeater,14,0,9
>> That is not a valid entry anywhere, but it is an example
>> of what a CSV string looks like. You see them all the time in
>> business applications that may be used with spread sheets and
>> tables.
>> One of my next home projects is to take the C program I
>> wrote for the BCD996 and try to re-do it in perl as I may get it
>> to do more than it presently does.
>> I would sure like to see more radios that have some sort
>> of electronic input and output like the Kenwoods and several
>> others. To me, that is almost as good as having speech boards in
>> the radio which, of course, is the holy grail but may not have
>> as much mass appeal as being able to interface with a serial
>> port on a computer or maybe a web interface.
>> Let's hope that this period of totally inaccessible
>> technology is ending and we just might be able to really use
>> some of this stuff again.
>> I remember the first truly inaccessible piece of amateur
>> radio gear I encountered. It was in the mid seventies and was a
>> two-meter transceiver that had an Up and Down button pair for
>> frequency, no direct entry and no way to get to a known state
>> except for that stupid little LED display. If you could even get
>> it to start at 144.000 MHZ, do you really want to count in 5 KHZ
>> steps up to say, 147.925 and hope there were no key bounces or
>> missed presses?
>> The guy in the store said, I don't think there is any
>> way you can use that and he was absolutely right. Don't you just
>> hate that?
>
>> 73 Martin McCormick WB5AGZ
>
>> Jim Gammon writes:
>>> John, I have been corresponding with the Whistler group
> regarding
>>> there
>>> trunked scanners. Thought you would like to read the latest.
> Jim
|
