Hi, Martin.  I'm looking for an accessible scanner; any current 
ideas?  And what about using USB interfaces instead of serial ones, 
as many systems no longer come with serial ports, and the 
USB-TO-serial adapters can be a little sketcy.--Matt, N1IBB.

At 10:14 AM 8/13/2014, you wrote:
>         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