Help required for a complete novice!!

[gavinminter]

Greetings from the Southern Tip of the world, South Africa!!

I'm a COMPLETE novice, so PLEASE bear with me.

Our commercial fishing fleet operates with trunking radio's. The vast majority have Kenwood TK-980/981 radios. ( Kenwood - TK-980-981 ) The rest use the older KAVICOMM trunk radios, which are basically radios that the trucking industry use.

I've got absolutely no idea whether they use analogue or digital or what frequencies they use.

I'm looking at buying a scanner, so that i can hear all the fishing action, as i live at the waters edge. Most boats will operate between 10 to 20miles or so from land.

What scanner would you suggest?

Thanx
Gavin

[AlabamaRS]

look up the company in the FCC database?

[Astrak]

Originally Posted by AlabamaRS

look up the company in the FCC database?

I don't think the the FCC has South African frequencies.

To gavinminter, I don't know the legalities of scanner use where you are but I think Uniden offers non US scanners. I think those Kenwoods are LTR radio's, depending on what scanner you get you might have to figure out the LCN(logic channel number) in order track the system properly.

[qlajlu]

Originally Posted by AlabamaRS

look up the company in the FCC database?

I dunno, Alabama. I'm not sure the FCC Database is going to be much good when we are talking SOUTH AFRICA!

Originally Posted by gavinminter

Greetings from the Southern Tip of the world, South Africa!!

I'm a COMPLETE novice, so PLEASE bear with me.

Our commercial fishing fleet operates with trunking radio's. The vast majority have Kenwood TK-980/981 radios. ( Kenwood - TK-980-981 ) The rest use the older KAVICOMM trunk radios, which are basically radios that the trucking industry use.

I've got absolutely no idea whether they use analogue or digital or what frequencies they use.

I'm looking at buying a scanner, so that i can hear all the fishing action, as i live at the waters edge. Most boats will operate between 10 to 20miles or so from land.

What scanner would you suggest?

Thanx
Gavin

Welcome to the RR.com Forums, gavinminter! That is pretty big step to ask for help in the US from South Africa.

Everyone will have their own personal favorites, but I would suggest the GRE high end scanners such as the PSR-500 (handheld) or PSR-600 (desk/mobile). The reason I say that is both of these models are digital capable, have terrific customer service backup, and the USB cable simply plugs into the scanner. That USB cable could help you because it would also can allow you to use a program like UniTrunker and "sniff" the airwaves for all kinds of new and possibly exciting frequencies without doing any "surgery" to the radio itself.

Because of your unique location, I urge you to return to your User CP (the left side of the second blue bar from the top of any page if you are logged in) and edit your profile to include your location as you were requested to do in the material e-mailed to you when you registered. Once you fill in your location it will automatically show in each of your posts. You will be asked over and over again what it is so fill it in now and be done with it.

[mciupa]

I would suggest the UBC800XLT - The RadioReference Wiki , it would already be set up for your voltage( being produced in Europe).
It already has a Marine Band Service Search Band preprogrammed as well.

[DickH]

Originally Posted by gavinminter

Greetings from the Southern Tip of the world, South Africa!!

I'm a COMPLETE novice, so PLEASE bear with me.

Our commercial fishing fleet operates with trunking radio's. The vast majority have Kenwood TK-980/981 radios. ...
I've got absolutely no idea whether they use analogue or digital or what frequencies they use. ...
I'm looking at buying a scanner, so that i can hear all the fishing action, as i live at the waters edge. Most boats will operate between 10 to 20miles or so from land....

Hi and welcome to RR. Had a friend in SA many years ago.
Those Kenwoods probably use LTR type trunking. It's rather difficult to figure out the correct channels to put the frequencies into, but it can be done. Search around this group.
The freqs. are common U.S. trunking freqs. so any triple trunking scanner will work. The triple denotes Motorola, EDACS & LTR type systems.

Kenwood TK-980/981
Type 1 (RX) 851~870 MHz 935 ~ 941 MHz
Type 2 (TX) 806 ~ 825 MHz, 896 ~ 902 MHz,
Type 3 (Talk Around) 851 ~ 870 MHz 935 ~ 941 MHz

The Type 1 freqs. are the ones you will need to monitor. Please ask someone in the LTR Forum how those systems work. LTR Trunking - The RadioReference.com Forums

This is a rather unusual situation for a trunking system. The repeater (main radio antenna) is probably on a high mountain as near to the ocean as possible and they may use a directional antenna since the ships are out at sea.

For a scanner see if there is a GRE or a Uniden dealer in SA.

Good luck.