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
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