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Butel ARC 780For years I have been
reading about the benefits of using a PC for computer controlling a radio,
before I became computer literate the very idea terrified me and hey what the
hell wont I be able to do without computer control anyway? Now look at me I'm
even writing this web page not only that it is about the very subject I have
shyed away from for all those years! So have I been missing out on anything?
To find out I decided to try out Butel's ARC 780 for computer controlling my
Uniden UBC 780 XLT trunktracking scanner. I have heard about Butel before,
they make software for other scanners. A quote from their site "BuTel
Software is not a new software company. Software development for scanners started
in 1992 with software for AOR AR3000 and AR8000.
The first thing you will need is some way of making the software and the radio to communicate with each other, for the 780 you will require an RS232 cable which connects to the back of the 780 and the other end connecting to a COM port on your PC. Once you have the cable you can now go to the Butel Website to download the software which is free for you to trial with some of the functions ommited. If you decide you like the software then you can go back onto their website and cough up the dosh, (39 Euros at the time of writing.) at which point you will be given a serial number and will now be able to access the previously locked out functions. Once I had downloaded the software I set the baud setting on my 780 to 19200 and selected my comm port (In my case comm port 1). Once the cable was connected I opened the program. As you sit back and look at all the icons it is a little daunting to say the least, the first thing I wanted to do was upload the contents of my radio to the computer, after mousing over the various icons I found one which read " Read data from Radio" this sounded like the likely chap I was after so I clicked on it and was met by a pop-up menu prompting me for more definition of the data I wanted to upload, well I wanted to upload all of it so I selected the all banks radio button and clicked the "all" button so that all options were selected such as frequencies and trunk ID tags etc. were selected. Once these were selected it was just a matter of clicking on the "Read data button" and away to work it went, giving a progress meter report as it went along it's business. It took in all I suppose 5 minutes to read and copy the data which is fine by my standards. Now it is amazing how different things look on screen, with all the contents of the scanner on screen I could see a few things that needed rectifying straight away, such as text that could be added to a certain frequency, (As this was not obvious to me before is testimony to the software) which could easily be done by typing it into the text box for that frequency. Ok After doing that simple task I wanted to see if it would work, so I transfered the data from the PC to the radio ( I did hit a couple of snags here but this was down to me not entering the required information for the transfer of information required ) and once complete manually tuned the 780 to the Channel that I had edited and sure enough it had worked! Ok I liked this, now time to experiment a bit more to see what else I could do. Clicking Tag field opens up a drop down menu which shows all data stored into memory, this gives the option of clicking on one of the texts to automatically insert it as the channel memory tag or manually type your own data. There are options for cut, copy, paste of information and data. I liked the search function to try it out I clicked on the Binocular Icon and was presented with a little pop-up Find data box, for a test I typed in Derby and it informed me that ch#15 in bank 1 I tried it in both upper and lower case and it worked in both. For finding further data (or frequencies) containing the same a further click will reveal the next location. You can search for duplicate frequencies and remove them. I selected the "including subtone" submenu to search for duplicate frequencies using the same ctcss tone and found two. I was most impressed. The only gripe I had here was When searching for duplicate ch's it will not let me edit until it has finished searching resulting in my forgetting where the duplicates were. This is no problem if you only have a couple of duplicate frequencies to remember but in my case there were quite a few.
All the time I was finding plenty of handy functions, there were two black arrow buttons, what Do they do? By selecting a frequency clicking any of these two buttons results in the channel being swapped with either the above or below channel, a nice touch. You could select your channels in ascending or descending order (Any plans for software for the Alinco DJX2000? This radio would greatly appreciate such a facility due to its slow scan rates when frequency order is out of sync.) The first thing I wanted to do was rearrange the alpha tags I had put into memory so I spent some time rearranging them (This would have taken forever and a day using just the radio) I had put some tags in all Uppercase which I now decided no longer looked good so I put them into lower case. Another nice touch was at the click of a button I could Centre the text, when downloaded to the radio the text was centred on the radio also! All the normal copy and paste functions that we have come to expect in other windows programs are there for you to use, various options are available copy cut or paste a single cell data or a full line of text. I tried this function by Right clicking on a line selecting "copy Line" Selecting an empty line, Right clicking and selecting "Paste Line" and in it went complete with alpha tag ctcss tone etc. To remove it I again right clicked the line selected "delete line" and was met with a pop up "Are You Sure?" selecting yes and it was gone. There are functions for clearing whole Banks but I did not experiment with these, but even if I did and I lost everything then it would have been a simple case of downloading the saved data to the radio to retrieve all my data. NOTE: after making the last statement I tried to see that this would actually work by closing down the ARC 780 software and reopening it and I was rather dismayed to see all the data missing apart from that is the bank tags. This was just a case of opening up the file that I had saved (File/Open) and all the data was there. To simplify this even further there is a backup and restore feature built into the software. ARC780 also provides a "dummy bank" which offers a further 50 channels to experiment with. You can use this dummy bank to create new data and tailor them to your required settings without fear of messing up any other bank data. Once you are happy you can now use the copy, move or swap functions to transfer the dummy bank data into one of the other "real" banks. You can now download to the radio. Trying out the edit search ranges easily done by clicking on the icon that looks like a torch I was able to tailor my search ranges to my hearts content, this included frequency ranges, alpha tags, step size etc. There is also an option to add search ranges via a bit of editing of a text file. Although this was excellent for most circumstances here in the UK there are a lot of users using 6.25KHz steps so it would have been nice to have been able to configure this.
One feature that I would like to have seen is the ability to add extra CTCSS tones, the Uniden 780 has a couple of them missing and it would have been nice to have added them via the software. For example one user I like to monitor uses the tone 69.3Hz but this is not available on the 780 and as it is a common frequency I get all and sundry coming through on this frequency. Unfortunately this is not possible as it is hard programmed into the radio itself making any software add-on in this respect not feasable. Bandplan: You have the option of editing the bandplan in as much as setting the default radio settings to your own needs, such as mode and step sizes. This looked interesting as there are some radio users here in the UK which use 6.25KHz steps and the 780 does not support this step size.Could I really go and edit this so that it accepts the step of 6.25KHz? OK to do this (I will go through it step by step as some less experienced computer users will be stumped at this point.) you need to find a dat. file called 780plan_UBC780 open it with notepad and from there edit the settings then save it to the arc780 directory (usually c:\arc780) Unfortunately this did not work for me so I will have to carry on receiving 6.25KHz steps at 5KHz. Another way the bandplan can be edited and another nice touch is that when you enter a frequency into the 780 the tuning step and mode are automatically entered for you. Now this is fine if you live in an area where the 780 was designed for (US) but here in the UK we have different bandplans, so the facility to alter these defaults came as a welcome addition. Again you need to edit a file, in this case it's the 780plan.dat file which again can be edited with any text editor (Again I used notepad) and you can alter or add any changes. The 780plan.dat file can be altered or added by using the following permutations. The zipfile you downloaded contains an example custom bandplan called 780plan.dat. How can you use and change a custom bandplan? Copy the file 780plan.dat from the zipfile to the directory where you installed
ARC780. FR25 MD2 ST0 'mode: ( MD ) 0=FM 1=WFM 2=AM 3=NFM Every line contains a frequency, mode and step.
Whilst reviewing this software I was informed of an updated version with few bugs ironed out and some extra features such as auto backlight, which enables the backlight to come on when a transmission is received and powers off when the transmission has ceased. This is a feature I have longed to see on scanners especially the hand held types so that battery consumption is saved. I duely downloaded the latest version. The auto backlight function I found worked well but whereas in some cases it would come on immediately when it stopped on an active frequency, in some cases it took up to three seconds before it activated.
Virtual control Switching to virtual control the data sheet is shrunk down and in its place up pops the virtual control (See below image) on the virtual control you can indeed control the scanner by a click of your mouse, just about every function that is available using your fingers on the actual scanner are there with the virtual control. The buttons are there to be clicked at will with your mouse. Playing around with the virtual control I found some of the menus much easier to use than the actual scanner itself, such as the mode, step, data skip, squelch mode and attenuation. On the 780 you have to do a fair few keystrokes to get to these menus but on the virtual control they are there, accessed by a single click! Very neat. The virtual control LCD is ample in size the only thing I would have liked to have seen here was the option to make it full screen, My living room is large and it would have saved the eye strain when sat at the far side of the room if there was a full screen option. But in all fairness it is larger than the 780's display, not only that but you can have numerous permutations of display colours, with numerous colours for background, foreground,display info, S-meter and active bank. So there should be something there that takes your fancy. The signal strength meter is replaced by a "Busy" rather than "S" as displayed on the 780. Followed by up to 6 extra segments depending on the received signal strength. The first four segments being one colour and the remaining two being another (Dependant on the colour scheme you choose). Added to the display are the current step size being used and a centre tuning graph indicating wether the 780 is centred correctly on frequency or not (Again this can be edited to suit). Right at the very bottom of the display is an option to change the refresh rate of the virtual display, basically this means that by decreasing the timer will refresh the virtual LCD more efficiently but this requires more system resources and could slow down other applications on your P.C. Other tasks A feature I found myself using a lot was to use the virtual control and shrink
it down whilst doing other tasks on my computer, when this has been shrunk
down you are left with approx 1 and half inch high by approx 3 inch wide (Sorry
I dont understand metric) window which shows frequency in use, Channel number
and bank number. You are left with controls over scan, manual, search, trunk
hold and lockout. Very nice. Well done Butel.
Screenshot of the Virtual control.
Importing Data The arc software includes the ability to import data from other applications you can simply paste the contents into the data grid. or import the data from another application I tried this with a microsoft excel database and to be honest I had no luck here the file that I was trying to browse to was not able to be found (It was on my desktop) as the browse feature would not allow me to look where it was located. To get round this problem I found that the best browse feature was to use the network option and pasting the file that I wanted to import there. This worked fine and the ARC software accepted it as a compatible data file however when selected it would not open up. However another word document worked with no problems whatsoever. Another option is to use the Webcatcher feature, however this is of more benefit to users in other countries as the UK has very few websites with frequency information. ARC 780 supports formats such as CSV (Comma seperated volumes if my memory serves me well) as supported by most office applications such as Word, Excel and most other variants. Search Feature The UBC/BC780 comes with ten search banks but the programming of these search banks are a little time consuming, well you guessed it, It is a hell lot easier with the ARC780 software. Just click on the "Torch" icon and you are presented with a window for editing the search ranges (Or events as Uniden call them). All the search features that you could set up manually are there including frequency step, mode and Alpha tagging. Another nice touch is the ability to add extra search banks to further compliment the 780's 10 search banks. This can be increased with the arc780 software to 200 extra search ranges! Again you need to do a bit of editing, this again can be set with notepad or similar text editor. You will need to locate a file called search.txt and add search ranges to your hearts content save it and away you go. I tried this and it worked flawlessly. Trunking The ARC 780 software fully caters for the trunking side of the Uniden UBC/BC780. With the software you can edit, change, add alpha tags, beep alerts, in fact every function for the trunking is available via the software. Unfortunately I could not try this feature as I can only access a trunked system via my outside antenna which is upstairs away from my main computer.
So How do I rate the software? I Think back in the days when I thought that I would be missing nothing by not using radio software I was very wrong, the ARC 780 is a great bit of kit and I find myself connecting my Scanner to my computer more and more now, it's even got to the point when looking over a new scanner I now look to see if it is compatible for computer controlling. Well done Butel You have opened my eyes to a new concept in scanning. If I can use this so can you. Do not hesitate to download your trial version www.butel.nl Thanks go to Butel for the software for the review.
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