Having big problems with my Home Patrol 1. It "used to" receive my city fire dept. (city of Charlotte) It had stopped. I updated the "HomePatrol Sentinel" software, several times. Then downloaded to updates to the Home Patrol unit. It did not work. Other entities would receive such as county fire and ems, but not city fire. I returned the unit to Uniden for repair. I paid the $70 repair charge and got the unit back in just over a week. It still did not work. The note on the receipt claims that I needed to update the Sentinel database before the HomePatrol database can update. The database version was 1/8/2012. I attempted to update the Sentinel database Again and update the HomePatrol unit. Still does not work. I returned it again with a note and payment. Uniden returned it with a new receipt claiming that the correct FD programming was done, and were kind enough to return the check. But the unit still does not work.
I called the customer service line at 800-297-1023 and spoke to Gale. I was on the phone for 31 minutes with Gale. The talk group ID's are not square with what I knew to work in the past. RadioReference shows frequencies Charlotte FD Alarm all the way to Charlotte FD 10Conf. And DEC and HEX, which I don't know what this is. On the Sentinel database, it shows Charlotte FD Alarm(Dispatch) to Operations 1K.
Currently, my Home Patrol 1 scanner, when manually selected, Charlotte Fire Alarm shows 1027, which is wrong!!! When the scanner did work, the talk group ID was 16432 on Charlotte Fire Alarm. All Charlotte Fire Dept. channels are out of sync, and my scanner does not receive them.
So RadioReference shows all the frequencies, but no talk groups. The Sentinel database shows the correct frequencies and talk groups, but only for the zone 1, no training or other zones. Updating Again" does not change the operation of the scanner, it still does not receive Charlotte Fire Dept. It still shows the wrong talk group (1027). Not only is this a problem, but my new Uniden BCD536HP is experiencing the same problem.