New Uniden scanners coming out in 2009 BCD396XT

[soupbones]

This just came up yesterday on he Radio Reference web site. Uniden has announced two new hand held models. The BCD396XT and the BCD246XT.
See the released details on the RR wiki here for the bcd396xt http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/BCD396XT

I hope we see this model in Australia next year.

[pks]

NAC decoding is finally added And from the looks of it, a built in discriminator tap is also included?

[Farsouthscanner]

NAC decoding is finally added And from the looks of it, a built in discriminator tap is also included?

A discriminator tap would be handy. It might be a stupid question but what is NAC decoding?
Mark

[pks]

NAC is a squelch for P25 transmission, pretty much like CTCSS or DCS for analogue transmission.

[Farsouthscanner]

NAC is a squelch for P25 transmission, pretty much like CTCSS or DCS for analogue transmission.

Thanks for that. If these scanners are released in Aus I know what I will be saving for. Hope they release a desktop with the new features like disciminator tap.
Mark

[Air490]

They are set to replace the 246 and 396, so I'm guessing we will see them in Australia eventually.

They are just Uniden catching up with GRE!

[soupbones]

I am guessing they will also release desktop/mobile models as well in the near future. As stated they are just catching up with GRE.
It would be much better if they just made these units with enough memory to allow for firmware updates that will do many of these features, since thats what they mainly are and not hardware updated as such. I have read that this is why they can't add major features to the current line of models.
Its amazing as its not like memory is expensive at the current time.

[citabria]

Dave,

UPman on Radioref is towing the company line... of course hes going to say that memory is the limitation and you need to spend $1,000 on a few features that takes a few lines of code... Extracting a NAC code form a bitstream would need a trivial amount of code (a few hundred bytes maximum)

If you dump a firmware update from a 996 or 396 into its S-record format, you can see that the program space is about 45% empty

Why release a firmware update for free, when you rename an existing scanner an -XT model and put those features into a new unit that costs more...

[soupbones]

True.

But given the current situation in Australia being that the majority o digital is now encrypted, I doubt that it is a feature worth getting excited about. Think they are a bit to late for us here in Oz. A small number might find it useful but I don't think it would make me buy an updated model.
The extra memory is great, but other then that I don't see many advantages for us in this new model at all. Hopefully it has better RX then the 396 models I have owned and used in the past.

[Air490]

I must agree. They have really done nothing that would prompt me to buy the new model. I bought a GRE PSR-500 and it is miles ahead of the Unidens. The constant free software upgrades from GRE see to that.