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