Hi, Jim.  I sent an email to the email address you gave, but it 
bounced.--Matt, N1IBB.

At 01:23 PM 8/13/2014, Jim Gammon 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