ScanPro895 Software - A User's View

by Mike Agner, KA3JJZ

Introduction
Several months' back I saw a note, probably on USENET, about some new software that was being marketed on ebaY. I sent a note to Rich and lo and behold, a couple of months later, I was asked to review it. Well, seeing that I was the gullible type (and getting free software was an incentive!), I quickly agreed.

This testing was done with the author - who, throughout the many emails with questions and comments, has remained anonymous, so we will refer to him as 'Mr.A', and as you will see, several interesting items came to light as I examined the software.

Installation
Installing this software was easy. Simply place the CD ROM into the drive, and execute the setup. You should be aware, though, that version 1.0.3 installed into a different directory- called ScanproBC895-than the current version 1.0.5 beta (Scanpro895). You might be better off overriding the choice of the directory and install into Scanpro895 to prevent future hassles when upgrading. I used version 1.0.5 beta for this review.

The software did find a newer .ocx file on my machine (a Windows 98SE using a Celeron 500 mhz processor), so I instructed it to leave it alone.

Operations - The First Bank Screen
Before executing the program for the first time, it's advisable to read the readme.txt file that comes with it. You will notice that it advises you to load at least 1 bank before proceeding. Although the program will run without at least 1 bank loaded, most of the features won't work until you do.

Unfortunately there is no Windows help file so you must have your owner's manual available as you work with this software. In addition, this software does not have a trunking module, so it will only work in the conventional mode.

As the program loads, it reminds you about putting the 895 into remote mode (push the 'RMT' button until it beeps) and to connect it to a valid COM port. If you don't you won't be able to use the software; and exiting it and trying to come back in will result in a run-time error. If you get this, you will need to restart your computer. This doesn't happen very often; normally the physical radio simply won't respond to PC generated commands.

Figure 1 shows the initial screen. You will notice that you get a picture of a 895 on the top - which we'll refer to this as the 'virtual radio' throughout this review - and there are various controls to the bottom.

Looking to the bottom, you will find tabs reminiscent of Excel with banks labeled 1 thru 10. This is a bit odd, since the banks on the 895 are labeled A thru J, but the association is quickly learned.

You will also notice a text box with the bank number in it. This is one way to jump from bank to bank. To use it, highlight or overwrite the bank number with the one you want, then press 'Load' or 'Save' depending on which operation is desired. If you need to just change banks, you can click on the Excel-like tabe at the bottom of the screen. This causes the bank to be reloaded.

Contrary to the tool tip for this slider, you should try to adjust the 'Master Comm Speed' slider to a value higher than 0. If it's left at zero, loading frequencies as well as several other functions takes place very slowly; increasing the value makes several functions faster. You must be careful, however, not to increase it too far, as errors may result. Some examples would be the alpha tags reading 'error' or the frequency displaying weird values (like .0004) when you hit the 'Stop Scan' button. Experimentation will be required to find the right setting for your PC.

This control is being used as an attempt to compensate for the various speeds and settings people may be using on their COM ports. Unfortunately the setting on this control is not recalled from one execution to the next, so you may find yourself having to adjust this every time you enter the program for the first time. A better solution might have been to set the baud speed up in an .ini file; that way, this control would no longer be necessary.

Pressing the 'Load Channels' button will load only 1 bank at a time. If you are loading slowly and want to load all 300 channels, this tends to be a very time consuming procedure. A better choice would have been to load all the banks at once, leaving it up to the user to select which banks to use.

Figure 2 shows the results of a load of the first bank of my BC895. Looking to the left, there are a series of list boxes. A couple of items immediately catch your attention. The 'Label' boxes are all greyed out and have 'not used' in them. Unfortunately these boxes are not keyable, so alpha tags are unavailable. Next to the label boxes you have 'DLY' (delay), 'LO' (lockout) and 'REC' (record). The 'REC' box is used the same way you would use the 'AUX' key on the real radio to set up a tape recorder for recording all traffic on a frequency. To avoid confusion, perhaps the 'AUX' label should be used instead.

After the 'REC' box, the PL for each channel is listed. This is followed by a 2 digit number. This didn't match any known convention so I wrote Mr.A, asking him what this number represents. It turns out this is Uniden's coding scheme for each PL. I have suggested that the software list the EIA codes which are more universally recognized by both hams and many scanner enthusiasts. I have offered to supply Mr.A with a list of these codes and their accompanying PLs, but so far I haven't heard from him.

The middle buttons take care of setting the priority channel, activating the priority function, activating the PL Search function and enabling the PL frequency for each channel in memory. At the bottom you see a listing of the active banks.

Most of the operations on this screen can be controlled by clicking the various buttons on the virtual radio, much like you would on the real one. There are a couple of major exceptions, however. The Weather Alert feature does not work on the virtual radio - it doesn't appear to remember that the 'Weather' button was pressed so that when you hit the 'Alrt/RMT' button, the weather alert feature activates. In fact, if you hit the 'RMT' button on the virtual radio, it resets the COM port, effectively disconnecting the radio from the PC. In addition, neither activating the PL Scan feature, nor tuning in VFO mode using the knob works. Stepping through memory must be done with the 'Manual' key on the virtual radio.

A significant change in the way most software works is the way you make changes. If you want to activate a priority channel, turn on PL Scanning, activate PL frequencies on each channel or change the active banks - one way to do this is to key in your changes into the boxes - then hit the 'Save To Scanner' box. This is a bit different than most software that would allow you to make these changes and see their effects immediately. The same method is used to enter new frequencies into a bank.

It should be noted, though, that some of these boxes are redundant - you can easily change the active banks or set up a priority by hitting the appropriate keys on the virtual radio, for example.

In addition, the 'Scan' button on the virtual radio works a little differently than the 'Scan' button on the bottom right corner. If you press the 'Scan' button on the right corner, depending on whether you have set the Master Comm Speed slide bar fast enough, you will start to see frequencies appear in the virtual radio's frequency display. They tend to lag a bit, however - it appears that it takes about 1-2 seconds of traffic before a frequency shows up. The frequency tends to blink on and off, indicating that the serial port is being polled. Pressing the 'Scan' button on the virtual radio seems to suppress the frequency display if the Master Comm Speed bar is set too low. I have suggested to Mr.A that these 2 buttons be made to work the same way.

The 'Save All Banks' button will take the contents of all the banks in the real radio, and save them to a text file, nominally named 'default.txt'. You can easily edit this file using Notepad, but be careful about leaving behind odd characters, or knocking the banks and channels out of sequence. Loading such a file can lead to the program complaining about a corrupted file and ending the load. An example of what 'default.txt' looks like can be found in Figure 3.

The 'Restore All Banks' button is supposed to do just that - it will take the contents of a text file you previously saved, and rewrite the 895's memory. There's a couple of flaws in the process, though and one of them is very significant if you are using the radio as a Trunktracker. It will rewrite *all* your banks as conventional memory, whether you had them previously entered as trunking or not. I have pointed this out to Mr.A as a real bug, and he has said that he is looking into it.

One way that I thought might be a work-around was to edit default.txt and remove the banks that were designated as trunking. I did this, and attempted to reload the radio. The reload failed with a run-time error, stating that an end of file condition was encountered before it was expected. In fact, Mr.A suggested that the best way to use default.txt is to move and delete frequencies, and not to change its length in any way, since it can cause a corrupted file error.

One other problem is that it tends to disable PL reception on each channel. Fortunately this is easily remedied - after the reload is complete, press the 'CTCSS' button on the virtual radio and PL reception is restored.

The Search Screen
Figure 4 displays this screen which is mostly self explanatory. Simply enter the lower and upper frequency ranges that you wish to search, and hit the 'Begin Search' button. You can skip up to 100 frequencies (just like on the physical radio), or you can restore them using the 'Restore Skipped Frequencies' button. When the radio stops for any reason (even a birdie), it will be recorded in the small window under 'Found frequencies'. The last frequency encountered is logged just beneath it (although only to 3 decimals). You can use the 'Save Search Results' button to save the logged frequencies to a Notepad-editable text file.

The frequencies shown on this screen are sensitive to the setting of the Master Comm Speed, which was discussed earlier. They do tend to lag a bit, and a frequency won't be logged if the traffic lasts less than a second or two. A frequency may also flash in the display sometimes, or even disappear for a second or two, as polling is taking place.

The deviation measurement is a bit interesting; Mr. A says that it is reported directly by the scanner. I'm not sure how the measurement is made, since I don't think there's a discriminator tap to look at the baseband audio. I didn't have the equipment to evaluate whether the deviation measurement (which sometimes goes negative, particularly when it stops on a birdie or TV carrier) is accurate or not.

I also noticed that the 895 tends to skip up one or two memory channels before actually beginning the search. Since other software I tried has this same quirk, this should not be a major concern.

In my testing, I deliberately tried to enter frequency ranges not covered by the 895. The software simply reverted to the last valid range searched. Mr.A says that it was left open to accomodate international users. While this is laudable, a better approach is to have the user state which region of the world s/he is in, and edit the frequencies based on a table. This information could easily be stored in an .ini file.

The frequencies encountered during a search seem to be the only thing stored in the file; no history (number of hits), nor a date/time stamp seem to be available.

The Enhanced Service Search Screen
Figure 5 displays this screen which is very similar to the search screen, except that you are given several ranges to search. The 'enhanced' is a bit misleading, since the 895 does not have a service search function.

I found it interesting that he included amateur frequencies in the 10, 6, 2, 70cm and 33cm bands. Since you are limited to searching in the FM mode, I wanted to see if the search properly reflected FM usage for each range. As it turns out, it's not quite accurate.

For example, the 10 meter range started searching at 29.0 MHz where AM (and some SSB) usage is common. Around 29.3 you hit the satellite downlinks. Nominally, 29.52 starts where FM repeater inputs are found, assuming a 100 kHz split. I've offered to help Mr.A develop the proper bandplans for each range, but I haven't heard from him on this as yet. A similar problem exists for each of the other ranges with the exception of 2 meters, where scanning starts at 144.9 mhz (some repeater inputs and ATV voice coordination frequencies can be found starting in this range).

Like the search screen, the Master Comm Speed will affect how quickly the frequencies are displayed. The same constraints seem to apply here - only when there's traffic that lasts more than a second or two will a frequency be logged as active. The flashing of the frequency display that was mentioned earlier also occurs here.

The Record Screen
Figure 6 displays this screen which allows you to record what you hear on the 895 in 2 different modes. In both cases, the file will be written to the Scanpro directory, and the file can be played by any WAV-compatible player.

One mode allows you to create a new file each time a transmission is detected. The .wav file that results contains a date/time stamp, along with the frequency, so long as there was enough traffic for the radio to detect it (usually about 1-2 seconds). This is accomplished by checking the 'Save Each Hit' text box.

This mode is also is sensitive to the setting of that Master Comm Speed bar that's on the bank screens. The lag in capturing the frequency may affect the name that's assigned to the file; and if there wasn't enough traffic to capture the frequency properly, it will be omitted. However, as long as there was enough traffic, the function seemed to work properly; see Figure 7.

There were occasions when the frequency seemed to disappear completely from the display, possibly because the software was polling.

There are also options on this screen to play back what you have recorded. These functions didn't seem to work for me at all; however, going into Explorer and playing the results back with the Windows wave player worked just fine. There is also a toolbar in the middle of the screen to make it a bit easier to rewind, stop the recording, and so forth.

The other recording mode allows one to just sit on a frequency and record what it hears. This mode still had some bugs for me; the 'Traffic Detected' light was always on, regardless of whether the squelch (which, according to Mr. A is what drives this light) was broken or not. When I tried to record my local ATIS, the software wrote a file, but had nothing recorded.

Make sure that you do not delete the beep.wav file that was placed in your ScanPro895 directory. There has been at least 1 instance where someone deleted the file because s/he didn't like it, and this resulted in some of the record functions not working.

Clearly this is one function that continues to evolve. Evidence for this is that in the last 2 releases fixes were made for these functions.

The Extended Scanning Mode
Figure 8 displays this screen which is perhaps the most powerful of the bunch. In this mode, you can type in up to 400 lists of 30 channels apiece, and have the scanner search them. One nice thing here is that the frequency display seems almost immediate, as it appears it's reading the frequency directly from the list you supply.

You can begin by typing each frequency in the list boxes to the bottom left. You can add some alpha text, though it's much too brief for my liking. As you complete one bank, 'Save' it then use 'Next' or hit the arrow button to advance to the next list.

Don't be too surprised when the program says that all 12000 frequencies have been saved, even though you haven't typed in that many. It appears that the software saves each extended bank in a 12000 frequency file. This is something of a problem; unlike the other text files this program saves, you cannot use Notepad here to edit it. You must use something else and be very sure to save it in a text format or you risk corrupting the file.

Make sure that when you start using this mode, you start with bank 100. I had all sorts of problems, until it was pointed out to me by Mr.A that I was probably starting at bank 200 (I was).

To link your banks together, you can do it one of two ways, depending on how many frequencies you have entered;

1. If your lists don't fill up all 30 frequencies, the help button suggests you edit your file and remove the headers and records with zero frequencies. You then bring up your list and 'Load' them.
2. If your lists use all 30 channels each, you don't need to edit them; just use the 'Load' button to logically link the banks together. This is not documented in the help text.

There is one easy way to get confused; if you want to stop on a frequency that interests you, don't press the 'Stop Scanning' button as it releases the file and you'll lose the frequency. Press 'Hold' instead.

'Lockout' can temporarily lock out a frequency from scanning. If you select Lockout either by using the button, or use the provided checkbox, then save the file, the frequency you just locked out will remain locked until you change it.

One fairly minor bug shows up when you return from this screen and go to the banks screen. The list of frequencies you had earlier is wiped out - you will need to reload them upon exiting.

Sharing Files With The BC245XLT?
Since there was no help to describe what to do, I developed my own method:

1. Press the 'Restore All Banks' button
2. Reply 'Yes' to continue
3. Point to the ScanProBC directory where Scan Pro 245 is installed
4. Click on the 'default.txt' file (or whatever you might have called yours)

1. Like the restore that was attempted earlier, the software will attempt to rewrite all banks, even those designated as trunking, as conventional banks.
2. Once you are finished loading, you are stuck on bank 10. If you try to make additional changes to other banks, you will overlay your currently active bank with Bank 10's data. You must click on the tab with the bank you wish to change before proceeding. This will reload the bank (again).
3. Since PL usage is not available on the 245, you must reset the 895 to scan for them. Be sure to check the 'Search for PL Tones' box before reloading. This is a limitation on the 245 firmware, and is not really a Scan Pro bug (although it would be nice if the software would remember that PLs were being used previously and have an option to enable or disable them if the user wants).

The search functions also work well, even though the frequency display problem complicates getting an accurate list of activity. It would also be nice if it were more intelligent; counting the number of hits, and a log of the most recent date/time the hit took place is badly needed. The optional Frequency Logger software-which does this function, and a great deal more - should be integrated with this software (perhaps with a programmable button - the program can search for the Logger software and make it visible if present).

The most glaring items that would tend to turn off a great many people would have to include overlaying banks that were trunked with conventional data (without user intervention), and the lack of a Windows help file.

The lack of a help file simply increases the complexity of using what is really a fairly simple radio to operate. Having to reload banks when you jump from bank to bank is inefficient and a huge time waster, particularly if done slowly. Having to set a COM port speed seems a bit antiquated, in light of the fact that the 895's maximum port speed is 9600 baud. There are many places where configuration settings in an .ini file would greatly help this program.

The use of a separate set of keys for some functions that require a separate save is a bit odd, particularly in light of the lack of a help file. Most users would expect to have changes work immediately (such as setting the Priority channel). Since most of the functions - with the exception of setting the PL Scan, which requires a 2 second press of the CTCSS key - work on the virtual radio, the redundant code should be eliminated. It would also be nice if the knob would work for VFO tuning, as it does on the physical radio.

The use of alpha tags - even given that they are not used in an active lookup, which many people like - is uneven. You can't use them in normal scanning, but they are usable, albeit as only documentation, in extended scanning. In my opinion, tags should either be usable on both or not used at all. Even better would be to use the alpha tags when a frequency is displayed. Room for this is easily found by eliminating the Status line, which sometimes shows very odd values. It may be useful for debugging, but not for the average user.

I got a comment from Mr.A that reading/writing trunking was unreliable and/or impossible due to design limitations. That's an interesting statement seeing as both Winscan and Trunk Manager (both packages that utilize the 895 as a Trunktracker) have been out there for quite a while now. Clearly, this is one function that should be examined a good deal more closely.

Screen integration could also be improved. It would be nice, for example, to be able to jump from the service search screen to the record screen without having to return to the bank screens first. Each screen should have an option to jump to all other screens.

No software is without bugs. That's a given and everyone has their own opinions as to what makes for the 'perfect software'. The bug free tag that's on the ScanPro web site is a bit of hype and Internet marketing. This review has identified several bugs - some of them serious - that merit serious attention.

In conclusion, I would say that this software should only be used by people who are fairly experienced with working on the 895 without having to constantly refer to the manual. These individuals would also be comfortable working with the 895 in a conventional mode only, without using the trunking functions.

That's a real shame, since it's almost like using half the radio. They should expect that there are flaws to be fixed - that's a given with any software. The author has proven to be responsive in answering questions and comments, and that's a big plus. But until this software is cleaned up, it very much remains a work in progress.

Mike Agner, KA3JJZ
ka3jjz@erols.com

Related link: ScanPro895 web page