By Jason Reilly.....

 

If James Bond was ever issued with equipment to scan the airwaves, this device would surely be near the top of the list from “Q” branch. The new to Australia Trident TRX100-XLT has all the necessary specifications to endear itself to Her Majesty’s Secret Service: small, ultra wideband, huge memory repositories, computer controllable, and a suave, sophisticated style befitting of 007 himself. Placing myself in the role of “Q” branch, my mission is to find an answer to this one question: just how good is this scanner?

 

 

Trident is a brand not familiar to our shores, but it certainly has kicked off with one good little radio. Surveying the rather bland cardboard box that the review unit arrived in revealed no clues as to what lay within. Let’s see: there is the usual power pack, a rubberised antenna, an instruction manual and - hello - what’s this? The scanner’s appearance is like nothing I’ve seen for quite some time, decked out in a flat chrome like silver livery. In fact, the last scanner I remember using a silver finish was a Tandy unit from about 12 years ago. 

 

 

This silver finish is once again regaining popularity, which is also being worn by the latest upmarket mobile phones. In the case of the Trident, I think it adds a sophisticated quality to it’s appearance, although this could be subject to your own taste in style. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I admit.

 

 

The overall unit measures 62 mm wide, 116 mm high, and 29 mm thick, which makes it truly ‘pocket’ sized, and at around 160 grams without the batteries, it is very light indeed, no doubt aided by the all plastic case construction. At the sides and top of the unit there is a rubber surround, rather reminiscent of the AR8000, and has a ’good grip’ feel to it. The top panel sports a BNC antenna connector, an earphone connector and a pair of controls arranged concentrically, with the outer ‘ring’ being used to control the volume level, and the centre knob used as a general ‘dial’ control. Both of these controls have a smooth and rather solid feel to them, not being the slightest bit fiddly to operate. The left side panel has a pair of oddly shaped push buttons, the top one being a function button, and the lower one is used to instantly toggle the squelch off or to normal. Below these buttons is the power receptacle, which is used to replenish charge to the three AA sized NiCD batteries.

 

 

The back panel is bereft of a belt clip or possible attachment for one. This could be rectified by using a protective carry case that has an integral belt clip, but I’m unaware of the existence of any such item custom designed for the Trident. Otherwise, the batteries are inserted here, and lurking within the battery compartment is a reset button and a flat cable connector that is again similar to that found in the AR8000. This connector is not mentioned in the instruction manual, however, I suspect that it can be pressed into service as an interface to a PC.

 

 

Casting a glance over the front panel reveals near the top a nice large LCD display that is quite clear, although like most LCD displays, it does tend to ‘wash out’ when viewing away from the optimum angle. The display shows the frequency, channel number and a nine-segment signal strength meter in a large easy to read size. Smaller indicators exist to show if the radio is in scan, search, manual or program mode, along with the attenuator and scan delay status, and smaller still indicators for the currently selected receive mode, channel lockout and keypad lock indicators. The priority status indicator is so small you will really need to study the display to see it - its the decimal point to the right of the display. Looking at the display very carefully, you can also just see that the receive mode indicators also include the modes USB and LSB - but don’t get too excited quite yet, these indicators never light up, nor can this particular radio receive those modes.

 

 

Below the display is a rather non-conventionally arranged keypad, but is simple enough to use for either left hander's or right hander's. A press of the LMP key bathes the LCD in a soft green backlight, along with backlighting each key on the front panel for five seconds. The location of the LMP key could be a little difficult to find in the dark, and I would have rather seen it appear on the side where it would be easy to locate. Still, the backlighting of the display and keys is quite bright and will provide more than enough light for you to find the keyhole in your front door at night (useless scanner hint #4). As so often is the case, most keys have a secondary function associated with them, which are accessed using the function key on the side panel. There is no confusion as to which sub-title belongs to which key due to the staggered nature of the keypad. It is good to see some controls, namely selection of receive mode and step size given a key as a primary function, rather than having to select them using a function-button sequence. Of course, you can select scanning, searching or manual mode at the touch of a button. The power on/off button is located at the extreme bottom left of the front panel, is slightly recessed to prevent accidental activation, and just to make sure, needs to be positively held in for one second to turn either on or off.

 

 

The 10 dB attenuator is useful to prevent front end overload of the receiver, and thus helps to reduce interference in areas thick with RF soup, however this attenuator is a one-in, all-in proposition, which affects all channels, not just on a per-channel basis. In a similar way, the delay function affects all channels at once, with the delay selectable between 1 and 10 seconds, and an option to stop searching or scanning once a signal is found. The beep that accompanies each key press is not proportional to the volume set, but don’t worry, it can be turned off if you feel the need. The priority feature can be set to look at any channel of your choice, and you can also select how often the radio pays attention to the designated priority channel, between 1 and 20 seconds. Memory channels can be locked out of the scan sequence using the ‘pass’ feature, or deleted altogether. There is a rather good bandscope feature, which will show a graphical representation of channel activity of up to four steps or channels either side of the frequency or channel currently selected. This bandscope feature not only works in the ‘VFO’ or manual mode, it also works while searching or even scanning! Even the refresh rate of the bandscope can be selected from a fast 1 second to a more sedate 10 seconds. There is a keylock feature that is so standard these days, it barely needs mentioning.

 

 

Included at no extra cost is a speech inverter descrambler, which is useful if you want to listen to radio users who scramble their transmissions using this method. Normally, all you would hear is a Donald-duck like garbled sound, however this feature effectively enables you to listen to this. This feature is not included as standard in any other scanner that I know of in Australia at the time of this review, and so the Trident gains itself a unique position in this respect. There is no indication that the speech inverter descrambler is activated, so if it is activated on a non-scrambled signal, the audio sounds quite weird, prompting you to turn the feature off. For interest, I tried to use this feature to listen to SSB transmissions, hoping that it might at least make some words recognisable, but alas, it did not help. I might add at this point that this descrambler definitely will not allow you to listen in to DVP encrypted police transmissions or any other form of digital transmission!

 

 

One key that is not explained in the manual is the ‘ESY’ key, which when pressed, activates one of 15 factory pre-programmed searches, very few of which correspond to Australian bands, but don’t worry, you can define ten of the standard search ranges to suit your own taste. Yet another key sequence enters a menu where you can select some parameters for connecting the Trident to a PC or ‘cloning’ the memories from one Trident to another. The manual does offer some advice on the interface cable used to connect one Trident to another or to a PC, but not enough to be fully useful. Speaking of PC control and cloning, this is effected via the earphone jack on top of the radio, but as I alluded to before, the connector in the battery compartment may well have a similar function, too. No information is offered by the manual as to the commands or setup required by the PC for control of the Trident, although I assume this information would be given with the interface unit when purchased. Dare I say, it probably won’t be too long before someone posts the necessary information to control or program the Trident with a PC on the internet…

 

 

Arming your Trident with it’s frequency ammunition is a fairly simple process, all you need do is to enter the frequency, with the correct step and mode. Here, you can choose steps of 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.25, 9, 10, 12.5, 20, 25, 30, 50, 100, 200, 250 or 500 kHz, and receive mode of AM, FM or Wide-FM, or an auto mode that will automatically select the step and mode based on the frequency you enter. This auto mode is not well set up for the peculiarities of the Australian spectrum, and no mention was made if this could be changed by computer software, although based on past experience of AOR scanners, this seems a likely possibility. From here, you press the appropriate buttons, to which the unit will ask you which of the 1000 memory channels, arranged in 10 banks, that you wish to use. Once you have made that decision, pressing ‘enter’ will complete the process. If you wish to do the reverse procedure, that is to copy the contents of a memory channel into the single VFO, there is a feature to do this too. Once in this VFO mode, you can initiate a search from this point by pressing ‘manual’. Simple. Once searching, if you find a frequency that you don’t wish to have bother you, it can be banished to one of 50 ‘search pass’ memories. All of the memories are of the non-volatile EEPROM type, meaning you won’t loose your valuable frequency data if you remove the batteries for a long period of time.

 

 

To set the Trident loose on the channels you have programmed, pressing the ‘scan’ button will do this. You can scan just one bank, or ‘link’ several banks together. The manual doesn’t mention it, but this can be done for search banks too, using exactly the same method. This process will be familiar to many AOR scanner users. Indeed, the overall experience of using the Trident gave me a strong feeling of deja vu, a feeling which is well justified. In other parts of the world, Trident sell other very AOR-like scanners.

 

 

I did find one software bug while using the ‘turbo’ feature, which speeds up the scan rate from 30 to 50 channels a second. Whenever the Trident is turned off, the turbo feature needs to be reactivated when next used. I also found that the indicator in the ‘turbo’ menu sometimes displayed the current setting incorrectly. The best indication to see if the turbo feature is on is to actually observe how quickly the Trident eats through the spectrum. Now that we’ve covered the physical aspects of the scanner, lets take the Trident out for a spin and see how it performs.

 

 

The Trident surprised me in that it seems more resistant to interference that I was expecting. I took the Trident to a hilltop bristling with towers, an area thick with the RF soup that I mentioned earlier. Any radio that doesn’t have a watertight frontend will be crushed by all the radio activity. Surely a torture test for any scanner. The Trident didn’t drop it’s bundle as I thought it might - in fact I didn’t notice any undue increase in interference at all. This may be due in part to the triple conversion employed by the Trident. It may also be due to the fact that the Trident isn’t as sensitive as some other handheld's I’ve used, but that is a fair trade-off in my books. I did note that the Trident was lacking sensitivity more than normal in the VHF airband and other bands that use the AM mode. Given that the Trident can cover 100 kHz to 2200 MHz with no gaps at all, I guess we should have a look at the shortwave bands and take a peek above 1000 MHz, too. For shortwave listening, the supplied antenna isn’t up to the job except to hear the very strongest broadcasters, and a larger antenna will need to be employed. Don’t go too far, though, too big an antenna overloads the HF portion of the Trident. As with most other handheld scanners, HF coverage on the Trident should not be seen as an alternative to a real HF communications receiver. At the other extreme, I was able to correctly receive a weak signal at about 2GHz, so I can assume that the receiver was working properly way ‘up there’.

 

 

The audio output is rated at 90 mW, which I found adequate for comfortable listening while driving a car around the city, with only moderate distortion when asking for full volume. The sound quality of the Trident is quite good with a bright, clear quality, although some points are deducted for a high pitched ‘tii-ing’ every time the squelch opened up on a signal. Speaking of the squelch, it is a little difficult to set, compared to your standard rotary control. The control is set digitally, by pressing the function button and the ‘monitor’ button below it, on the side panel, and a figure dialled up on the display to set the squelch. One problem with the squelch is that if you set it so that a weak signal can be heard on VHF, the effect on UHF is that the squelch opens and stays open. To overcome this, a higher setting is required, but this sacrifices some sensitivity on the VHF bands. Other than these minor niggles, the Trident performs it’s duties without fuss.

 

 

Battery life of the Trident seems quite good. I gave the unit a good thrashing on some pretty active channels, and came up with 7 hours use on 600 mAh batteries. There is a battery meter that, in theory, should show you how much listening time you have remaining, however, I found the battery meter was full scale until the batteries were nearly exhausted, and hence of not too much use.

 

 

The manual supplied with the TRX-100XLT “spectrum finder” as Trident calls it, is unfortunately not as good as I’d hoped. I found that it was difficult to read in parts, and didn’t fully explain all the controls or functions as I noted a few times previously. It does, however, give a good guide to using the basic features of the scanner, and offers plenty of diagrams to help.

 

 

To sum up, the Trident TRX-100XLT is a very wide coverage, easy to use (especially given the number of features crammed within the small case) computer controllable, reasonably interference resistant, snappy styled receiver.