LA County Fire Radio Traffic

[GAP49]

I recently bought a PRO-404 scanner and am very frustrated by one major problem. I listen only to Los Angeles County Fire Dept frequencies and intermittently you will hear radio traffic from various other entities, some of it with very annoying noises. The other strange thing is that it seems at those times when you hear traffic from one extraneous entity, you can also hear one or two other entities with traffic at the same time, none of which are LA County Fire. An example is their BLU-3 frequency, which I programmed at 470.6125, but it displays as 470.612, followed by a small number 5. Has anyone out there experienced anything similar or know of anything I can do to filter out all the unwanted traffic?

Thanks.

 

[PaulNDaOC]

Sounds like your experiencing imaging that is common on dual-conversion, lower priced scanners.

If it is in fact image interference you can avoid a lot of this by figuring out what the image frequency is for your radio and adding that number to whatever frequency you want to scan.

 

[jrholm]

Also, some of the north county fire freq's are shared with South Bay police agencies.

 

[f40ph]

Scanners with CTCSS are a god-send in dealing with this issue (at least in some counties).
Sorry to hear LACo uses CSQ.

 

[LZJSR]

LA County Fire does not have CTCSS tones on the receive on the UHF/Blue channels, only the transmit... unfortunately. Same with LASO.

 

[judas12]

Speaking of fire, this morning I've been hearing Springs, Vernon, Compton, Downey fire departments and Care ambulance working together somewhere on Olympic Blvd. Something about 20-30 patients are critical and to set up triage. Anyone knows whats going on ?

 

[GAP49]

Thanks to everyone that responded, especially PaulINDaOC. I calculated the image frequency and added it as you suggested and so far, so good. Haven't had the chance to listen too much since, but I am really hoping this takes care of the annoying extraneous traffic.