Decimal, Binary, Octal, and Hex

27Apr 2021 by Phil No Comments

Today we talk about several different numbering schemes. Two of which we find in the scanner radio environment.

What You Will Learn in This Week's Podcast:

Decimal system can be thought of as human-readable digits.
These are easy to use to read and compute.
They are also easy to convert from one form to another.
While decimal works well with humans, it is not the case with computers.
Binary language is used for them. It has two bits 0 and 1.
Octal is a 8 bit system. This is how we save a little bit of room in a system.
0-7 make up 8 bits.
Hexadecimal (Hex) is a 16 base system with values from 0 – F.
There are no numerical symbols that represent values greater than nine, so letters taken from the English alphabet are used, Hexadecimal A = decimal 10, and F = decimal 15.
I stick to decimal format when I program talk groups into my scanners.
When you look at Radio Reference, Trunk SysIDs and WACN are in Hex.
RFSS and Site ID’s are shown in Decimal with Hex in parenthesis.
Talk groups on Radio Reference have a column for Dec and a column for Hex.

More info:

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