ZIP and GPS Simulation

ZIP and GPS Simulation

Enter a ZIP code or GPS coordinate and see exactly what the BearTracker 885 will scan at that location - including statewide and national channels that show up on top of the local ones.

How it works

The BearTracker 885 decides what to scan using:

1. A firmware ZipTable that maps each ZIP to a primary county, a set of neighboring counties, and a radius.
2. A CityTable that maps ZIP/city pairs to coordinates.
3. Service-type + button state (Police/EMS/Fire/DOT + Multi-dispatch).

Scanner Manager reads the firmware ZipTable*.dat and CityTable*.dat directly from your card (when available), supplementing them with a small offline fallback so the simulator still works if the firmware files haven't been decoded yet.

Enabling it

1. Tick Enable Location Filter in the toolbar.
2. Enter a ZIP (fastest) or pick City... / GPS... for other input modes.
3. Optionally widen or narrow the radius via the Tolerance slider (adds or subtracts miles from the firmware default).
4. Click Apply.

Reading the results

Every visible system is prefixed with a rank (#1, #2, ...) showing its distance-from-center ordering; groups inside are also ordered by distance. Each group is tagged with one of:

Tag	Meaning
COVERAGE	Center point falls inside the group's coverage radius.
NEARBY	Edge of coverage is within the global nearby threshold.
LOCAL	Group is pinned to this ZIP's primary county.
STATEWIDE	Group is a state-level system (shows when any ZIP in-state).
WIDE	National / multi-state system (e.g. interop, FAA, FRS).

Groups without any tag are not in the effective scan set and are hidden by default.

Nearest-systems ranking

When Enable Location Filter is on, systems are sorted by distance from the center point and re-labeled with #N prefixes. The ranking respects which button filters are active (Police/EMS/Fire/DOT/Multi), so toggling buttons visibly re-ranks the tree.

Exporting the effective scan set

Click Export Effective Scan Set... to write a CSV/TXT containing:

• System, Group, Entry
• Service Type
• Frequency / TGID
• Lat, Lon, Range (mi), Distance (mi)

Useful for sanity-checking a deployment or sharing with another scanner owner.

Under the hood

See Architecture for how the simulator plugs into the HPD tree and how it coexists with the MetaStore event log.