WMartin@SIMTEL20.ARPA (07/02/84)
From: William G. Martin <WMartin@SIMTEL20.ARPA> Gentlefolk: I finally did what I promised I would do and looked up the Monitoring Times discussion of the source of the new-style wide-coverage Regency scanners. Refer to the March, '84, issue. The Regency MX-5000 is really the Japanese AOR Corp AR-2001 scanner with a Regency nameplate. This AOR scanner had been marketed in Europe since Fall '83. In the April, '84, issue, there is a report on this model which states that the plastic cabinet allows excessive synthesizer noise to feedback and swamp the scan/search function when the attached indoor whip antenna is used. Works much better with an outdoor antenna. Some rather poor user-interface design comments, too -- you have to ride the squelch control to stop it on-frequency in search mode, and restarting searches start over again from the start point, not where it last stopped. Yech... Regarding the discussion of the worth of the bulletins and the value of Morse -- over on the ARPA/MILNET side, here on Info-Hams, the START of those discussions never appeared, as far as I can recall. We suddenly started seeing follow-ups, but never the base or original postings which started all this flamage. Somebody want to find and re-post those items so the other half of the world can see what we should be flaming at or about? (Add a subject line indicating that this is the original re-posted, please.) For what it's worth, I like the bulletins and I'm not even a ham. I can ignore what doesn't interest me. (I am not qualified to comment on the code business; even if there was no code requirement, I doubt that I would have gotten a ham ticket. I am more interested in reception than transmission. The only thing ever tempting me to become a ham was the whole idea of having a 2m handheld with touchtone pad, which I could use over a local repeater for a much-less-expensive mobile telephone service. The reports of malicious interference and the need to be careful about "non-business" usage put me off that idea. I understand that most repeaters allowing telephone patch-thru require users to join a support group and pay a fee, which seems reasonable. How much is this, normally? Is the service usable and available enough to make this worthwhile for an ordinary person [as opposed to one who lives on the phone -- you know the kind]?) Will -------