I traded an expensive toy for my Home Patrol-1 about 6 months ago. It worked great for my purposes until 2 days ago. When I push the start button, with charged batteries and the AC charger plugged in I get the battery charge question screen, usually, then the Home Patrol title screen. The next screen with my name on it (programmed for me from the previous owner) is as far as it goes. The power button does not work, I have to unplug the AC charger and pull a battery to get the unit to shut down. The next attempt results in the same freeze on the owner name screen.
I have been told by the previous owner this HP-1 has the Extreme upgrade. I assume I need to download the Sentinel program and attempt an update. Has anyone seen a problem like this? Will I need a product registration key? Thanks in advance from a newbie, John

It could be that the radio is not reading the SD card properly. Under the batteries in the back is the SD card. If you have a card adapter and/or a reader in your computer, take the card out of the scanner and plug it into the adapter/reader in your computer. The card should show up as a removable drive in Windows. And yes, you will need to download Sentinel.. among other things, the radio gets regular (weekly) updates to its internal database from Sentinel.

Once you have Sentinel installed and updated ("Update Master DB" in the menus), and if the card can be read by the computer, you can try reading it ("Read from HomePatrol") and/or writing back to it. You may have to format it, clear it ("Clear User Data'"), or trash it and go with a brand new card (2GB to 32GB will do).

Jay just may be right, i'd almost bet that who you bought the HP from took the SD card out.

That hadn't even occurred to me - I was under the impression that if you see the owner info screen, it has to have a card in it, and the "SD Card Error" message would pop up for a damaged or missing card.

Max2248 wrote:


The OP said that the Home Patrol worked for the first 6 months he had it, so the SD card would have been there when he got it.

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Thanks guys! JAY911 was right. I tried the "clear user data" and it reported a corrupt SD card. I got the old card to work again but the keypad was sluggish and everything was slow and no sound when on a channel. I never got a "SD card" error except when trying to "remove user data". I put a new 8 SD card in and fumbled for a half hour and bingo it works great. I have been playing around with the settings, this thing picks up everything! Thank you for your expertise. I hope to give back to a newbie one day.