Tune, Track and Scan These: Driving Your Scanner from the Map

Scanner Follow also works the other way round: the UKAFG map, open inside Squawker PC, can put your scanner on a frequency, follow one aircraft’s likely frequencies as it flies, or hand the scanner a whole list from a map popup. These buttons only appear in Squawker PC’s map window, and only once a Connect profile the map can drive is open — they’re never shown in a browser.

Three buttons do this:

• Tune — one frequency, now.
• Track — one aircraft, kept up to date.
• Scan these — every frequency in a popup, as a scan list.

Tune

In the aircraft panel’s Listen on block, a Tune button sits beside the predicted frequency and beside each “also try” alternative. Popups for airfields, transmitter sites, repeaters and WTR companies have a Tune at the end of every frequency row.

With a Fast Scanner profile, Tune switches it to Radio mode on that frequency — AM in the air bands, USB below 30 MHz, NFM elsewhere, or the mode the popup names (a repeater’s NFM, with its CTCSS tone in the label). If the profile was scanning, the engine is restarted in Radio mode for you. The map shows a toast such as Fast Scanner: 124.600 MHz · Airspy main when the radio is on frequency, or says why not.

Track

Track, beside Tune in the aircraft panel, makes the Fast Scanner scan a short list built for that aircraft and keeps the list current as the aircraft moves:

• A civil aircraft: the predicted frequency, the next two best, and the next sector’s frequencies — up to six.
• A military aircraft: the predicted frequency, the UKAFG Station’s latest placement, the squadron’s air-to-air and ops frequencies, the Swanwick Mil sector and towline, the base’s approach and tower when a military zone is within 25 nm, then the rest of the candidates — up to eight.

The button reads Tracking ✓ while it runs, and the Fast Scanner’s Now-Listening panel shows Following VIR157L · 127.100, 133.975. The list is re-sent whenever the prediction changes while that aircraft’s panel is open; each change restarts the engine, so expect a second or two of silence at a sector boundary.

Track ends when you click Tracking ✓ again, close the panel, pick another aircraft, or press ■ STOP in the Fast Scanner. Your profile’s own list is back on the next Start. Your lockouts still apply to a tracked list.

Scan These

Popups whose frequency table lists more than one channel — an airfield’s services, a transmitter site, a repeater, a WTR company — carry a Scan these N button above the table. The Fast Scanner receives the lot as a scan list named Map: East Midlands (EGNX) (or whatever the popup was), with each entry’s own mode, selected and scanning at once; the Now-Listening panel notes Map list: East Midlands (EGNX) · 12 channels.

The list is temporary until you keep it — see The Scan Lists Tab for the Keep button, the prompt when the window closes, and the three-list limit. WTR digital channels are listed with their mode but scanned as NFM.

Hardware Scanners

With no Fast Scanner open, a Tune goes to a hardware radio in the newest Connect profile that can take it:

• Uniden and X36/SDS sets — over the serial link, as a quick-search hold on the frequency with AM or NFM set to suit.
• Quansheng — the frequency keyed into the VFO.
• ICOM — a CI-V set-frequency command.

The Connect window’s Frequency box takes the new frequency and its status reads Uniden tuned to 124.0000 MHz from the map · East Midlands Radar — listening (see Live Scan). Whistler, Proscan and the SDR# / SDRuno plugin profiles can’t be tuned from the map.

These radios can’t scan a list they haven’t been programmed with, so Track on a hardware scanner holds the single most likely frequency, retuned as the prediction changes, and presses Scan for you when the Track ends. Scan these needs the Fast Scanner and the map will tell you so. The key sequences follow each radio’s conventions and have been checked on Uniden sets; if yours doesn’t respond, please report it with the model.

Which Profile Gets It

When more than one Connect window is open, a Tune, Track or Scan these goes to the profile with Follow on map switched on; failing that, to the most recently opened profile with a radio, a Fast Scanner being preferred over a hardware set.