TWO SCANNER PATENTS by Bob Parnass, AJ9S Here is the information I published a few years ago about two of the scanner patents held by General Research Elec- tronics (GRE), makers of most Radio Shack scanners. You can find out this type of information by spending a few minutes in your corporate or academic law library. A Channel Lockout Invention Almost every model scanner sold today provides a way to bypass, or "lock out" channels from being scanned. It wasn't always this way. The first Bearcat scanner, a crys- tal controlled model with a row of red lights, had no lockout provision. On February 26, 1974, a U.S. patent was granted to a Japanese citizen for a "frequency skipping system" for scan- ning receivers. Patent 3,794,925 was granted to Kazuyoshi Imazeki, of Tokyo for a "Frequency-Skipping System for a Signal-Seeking Receiver." Filed almost two years earlier, Imazeki's development was described as a "switching network" operable "to cause the scanning circuit to skip those frequencies which the opera- tor does not want to monitor." The need for a lockout circuit was evident: "in some situa- tions the operator may not be interested in receiving one or more of the channels. Unless some provision is made for skipping these undesired channels, the system automatically tunes the receiver to them whereupon the operator must either listen to the undesired channel until it goes off the air or manually advance the receiver to the next channel." Earlier lockout schemes had drawbacks. The circuitry was "relatively complex and expensive" and had "the further disadvantage of requiring almost as much time to skip a channel as that required to tune to, and through, that chan- nel. In a system having ten or more channels of which only two or three are of interest to a particular operator, a relatively substantial amount of time is lost tuning through the 'skipped' channels." An example of this slower scheme was the way the Heathkit GR-110 scanner accomplished lockout, by merely providing a switch in series with each crystal. In Imazeki's scheme, an extra clock pulse was applied to the scanning counter circuit when a locked out channel was next in the scan sequence. This innovation allowed faster scan- ning of desired channels, by forcing the scanner to the next channel. The patent assignee is General Research of Electronics Inc. Priority Scanning Scheme It was 16 years ago last month that a U.S. patent was granted to a Japanese citizen for a priority scheme for scanning receivers. On April 2, 1974, patent 3,801,914 was granted to Kazuyoshi Imazeki, of Tokyo for a "Priority- Frequency System for a Signal-Seeking Receiver". Filed almost two years earlier, the system provided for a "signal seeking receiver to automatically tune" ... "to a priority signal whenever it is received. During non- priority receiver operation, a scanning circuit causes the receiver to automatically scan a plurality of predetermined frequencies and tune to a received signal have a frequency corresponding to one of the predetermined frequencies." In Imazeki's scheme, a low frequency priority oscillator periodically halts the scanner's clock circuit, interrupting the normal scan sequence. The priority oscillator's output is also connected through a multi-position switch, which allowed the user to designate an arbitrary channel as the priority channel. The circuit diagram in the patent looks familiar. That's because it forms the basis for the priority feature found in many crystal controlled scanners. The assignee is General Research of Electronics Inc. -- ============================================================================ Bob Parnass, AJ9S - AT&T Bell Laboratories - att!ihuxz!parnass (708)979-541