Jed Barton writes:
> Anyone had any luck with using speech friendly software to program any of
> the digital scanners?

	Well, I don't know how helpful this is, but I use Linux
which, once you get some sort of speech going with it, is quite
speech-frieendly. I have a Uniden BC780 Trunk Tracker that has
an RS-232 port on the rear. If you look on the Internet, you may
be able to find a file called protocols.txt which describes the
traffic between the BC780 and a computer. Basically, you send
commands in the form of upper-case groups of letters and numbers
and the scanner responds back by either telling you some result
or that you made some sort of error. If, for example, you want
to program Channel 15 to be 155.43 MHZ, you send

PM015 0154300

and hit the carriege return and the scanner echos back what you
just sent if you did it right.
If you want to set PL tone Number 14 on that channel, you send

CS014

The scanner replies with OK if you did it right or ERR if not.

	There are command sets that let you set up trunking and
set or clear talk groups and all that does work through the
serial port.

	I bet the 96 has something similar but I don't have one
so I have never looked to be sure. It could even be that the
commands are the same but with new ones added. Again, I just
don't know.

	So, if you want to do this from Linux, you will need a
free serial port and you should install a copy of kermit. You
can also do this under DOS and ms-kermit if you want to try that
route. You can even write kermit scripts to do more complex
things with your scanner.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group