Can anyone explain in plain English what this is and how to program it
into my scanner.Have a BC898T Bearcat.The owners manual is no help at
all.No pc to program it like that. TIA

Mike

"Mikey Mike" wrote in message
...
Can anyone explain in plain English what this is and how to program it
into my scanner.Have a BC898T Bearcat.The owners manual is no help at
all.No pc to program it like that. TIA


The ctcss is a subaudio tone that is transmitted. There are standard tones
that range from about 80 to 250 hz. One way they are used is like in the
county I live in. There are several fire departments on each side of town.
The main dispatcher will just send out the tone to the department they want
to go to a fire. The other departments will not hear the call.

DCS works similar. It is a digital code that is sent to turn on a receiver
audio to a specific receiver or group of receivers.

You do not need or want to enable this on most scanners. That way you will
get all the calls on the frequency.

On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:02:01 -0600, (Mikey
Mike) wrote:

Can anyone explain in plain English what this is and how to program it
into my scanner.Have a BC898T Bearcat.The owners manual is no help at
all.No pc to program it like that. TIA

Read the first 2 entries here to see what they are. Someone who has
an 898 (or a manual) will have to confirm my suspiscion that the 898
doesn't do CTCSS or DCS. (As you'll see from reading the Radio
Reference wiki, that won't prevent you from hearing anything.)

From the Uniden web site:
http://www.uniden.com/products/produ...product=BC898T

DCS/CTCSS Rapid Decode - Instantly Detects and Displays the Subaudible Tone So You Can Quickly Determine the System Settings.

The way scanner listeners make use of this feature it to narrow down who you want to monitor on a given frequency.

Lets say for example you live in town A, and your fire department uses 151.500MHz, with a CTCSS tone of 123.0, and very close to you in town B, the local tow truck service also used 151.500MHz, with a CTCSS tone of 88.5. If you did not enable the CTCSS feature, you would be hearing communications from both your fire department, and the tow truck service in the neighboring town, and they would often interfere with each other.

Say you only want to listen to your fire department, and ignore the tow truck service in the neighboring town. By enabling a CTCSS tone setting of 123.0, you would lock-out all transmissions from the towing service, and only hear your local fire department.

DCS works in a similar manner, but is a newer digital method.

The bottom line is using CTCSS, or DCS, allows you to hear less, not more, which is sometimes desirable.

Bill Crocker



"Mikey Mike" wrote in message ...
Can anyone explain in plain English what this is and how to program it
into my scanner.Have a BC898T Bearcat.The owners manual is no help at
all.No pc to program it like that. TIA

Mike

It's also good if you have interference on a frequency. you can block that out but still let the radio traffic through if you have their tone programmed in.

Gary
"Mikey Mike" wrote in message ...
Can anyone explain in plain English what this is and how to program it
into my scanner.Have a BC898T Bearcat.The owners manual is no help at
all.No pc to program it like that. TIA

Mike




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