Writing to Your Scanner

Summary: What happens when you click Send to Scanner, and two things worth knowing before you rely on this for anything you can’t afford to lose.

Once your Systems and Groups are set up the way you want, click Send to Scanner to write everything to the radio. Every write fully erases the scanner’s existing memory first – there’s no incremental or merge option, so whatever’s currently on the radio will be gone once you confirm.

Confirmation

You’ll see a confirmation prompt before anything happens, warning that this overwrites all data on the scanner. If Auto backup before sending is ticked, a backup is taken first – see Model Differences for which models that’s currently confirmed reliable on.

While It’s Running

A status overlay shows progress system by system. The whole window locks while this runs, and – as with the SDS100/SDS200/UBCD3600XLT family – there is no Cancel button once a write has started. Closing the window mid-write shows a warning that the scanner may be left in an incomplete state, but doesn’t cleanly abort the write in progress.

Partial-Write Reporting Differs by Model

This is worth knowing clearly: on a UBC3500XLT, the completion message tells you exactly how many channels out of your total were successfully written, so you’ll know if something didn’t make it. On a BCT15X or UBC800XLT, the completion message just confirms success with no per-channel breakdown – if an individual channel fails to write (for example, a 700 MHz channel sent to a UBC800XLT, see Model Differences), it’s skipped silently rather than reported. If you’re programming a large channel set on a BCT15X or UBC800XLT, it’s worth doing a Read from Scanner afterward to confirm everything you expected actually made it across.