Another rant on rx-only trunking radios

[mr.syntrx]

I bought an MTS-2000 the other day, and saw something that really annoyed me.

If anyone wants to know a good reason why programming trunked radios as receive only is considered to be such a serious matter, it's because of people doing silly crap like this:



And selling these radios to the unsuspecting public on eBay, for use as scanners.

As you can see, this radio certainly isn't programmed as "Receive only on the GRN" (Government Radio Network, my state's SZ OL system.)

[AEC]

All I can say to the person trying to use that radio as a'scanner' is a tune by Mr. Rogers, modified, of course..

* Could you be mine, would you be mine.....
Won't you be.....MY CELL MATE?*

Enterprize.....One to beam up!

[kc7gr]

All the would-be "scanner" user would have had to do is change the 'Affiliation Type' to 'Disabled,' yes?

This is curiosity on my part.

Keep the peace(es).

[mr.syntrx]

They would have to change 'Coverage Type' to 'None', change 'Affiliation Type' to 'PTT', turn off Omnilink, change the connect tone to something that isn't valid, and program one position of the concentric or ABC switch to 'Tx Inhibit'.

There might be something else that would have to be changed, but I don't know. I only do conventional, ham and UHF CB on this radio anyway, because there's not much worth listening to on that system for me.

[RESCUE161]

"Disabled" is not an option on those radios. Choices would be "On PTT" or "Automatic".

You would have to set the coverage type to "Disabled", set the affiliation type to "On PTT" and set the concentric switch to TX Inhibit for both positions.

That should do the trick. Smartzone forces the radio to affiliate regardless if the radios PTT is pressed or not.

[RESCUE161]

Sorry, looks like we were posting at the same time...lol

Once you set coverage type to sometime other than Smartzone, then Omnilink should either be greyed out or not accessable.

[wavetar]

If the radio is initially programmed as SmartZone with all the control channels (up to 32), you can then switch it to "WAC AMSS" and all the control channels will remain (normally you can only have up to 8 in AMSS)! Bit of a programming bug which works for us. Now you can disable the affiliation & keep your control channels.

Todd

[motorola_otaku]

They would have to change 'Coverage Type' to 'None', change 'Affiliation Type' to 'PTT', turn off Omnilink, change the connect tone to something that isn't valid, and program one position of the concentric or ABC switch to 'Tx Inhibit'.

And even that won't prevent it from being inhibited by the sysadmin, should he decide to send a kill command to the 0001 ID. One thing I hate about the MTSX and Astro radios is the inability to disable Radio Inhibit or set the individual ID to 0000.

[mr.syntrx]

You can't disable inhibit for trunking - you can only disable MDC1200 inhibit commands.

Just as well, too. Imagine some fool sending an inhibit command on your local ham repeater to 'FFFF'!

[bernie]

My two bits worth:
This radio would certainly be a receive only model if the PA was removed...

[Microwave Mike]

Look the only way to make a " SAFE " radio is to remove the PA, and load the output of the Tx VCO.
An even better way is to USE A SCANNER!!!!

mm

[wazzzzzzzzup]

well you could disable keypad menu options for zone and mode, set channels 1-16 of the top rotary knob to mode selection of conventional simplex 853.4875, then set a different scanlist for each channel 1-16 and in each scan list have it point to an actual trunked channel in memory above the accessable chan 16 such as 17 to 33, set scan to revert to selected chan (conventional simplex) if ptt is pressed, and of curse to be extra careful, you set all the other things you all are already mentioning. this method works great for MTSX series radios. you are never realy on a trunked channel, you only scan unaccessable trunked channels while sitting on real conventional ones.

bingo!


wazz