Safe-T Programming Advice/Questions

[aliby19]

All,

My apologies for a double post. I added this as a reply to the "Programming ALL of Safe-T into a 396XT" topic but felt it deserved its own topic.

I'm curious to see how everyone is setting up their Uniden scanners. What I've done so far is create a system for a county's Safe-T frequencies/channels as well as a system for conventional freqs. Inside each are separate groups (Fire, EMS, Police, Sheriff, State Police, etc). Does it make sense to do it this way? Is this the way others are doing it? Basically I envision being able to enable or disable a county's frequencies and talkgroups by enabling/disabling systems.

Does anyone have any suggestions, best practices, examples, etc. of how they've programmed their Uniden scanner for Safe-T and conventional? I plan to use mine while mobile and before I start throwing everything I can find in it, I'd like to make sure I'm setting it up in the most logical manner.

Also, here's a Safe-T related question. Monroe County has 3 different Safe-T towers (Bloomington, Paynetown, and Hindustan). With my setup, I have only included the Bloomington tower and not the other two. Should I be including the other two towers in my scanner configuration? If so, should I be locking them out and just enabling them when needed?

I'm still getting the hang of programming my scanner. I do use FreeScan and import from the RadioReference database. Any thoughts or suggestions on the matter would be appreciated.

[aliby19]

Another question -- Does a county's talkgroups only identify with that county's towers? Basically what I'm asking is if I could receive Morgan County traffic on Monroe County towers?

Thanks!

[frankcastle]

Here is how I have mine set up. I too set up different systems by county. SAFE-T, Conventional, then also any other trunked system that might be in use by that county. Then I assigned each county their own quick key. That way as I travel from area to area, I just activate or de-activate that county's quick key. The trunk frequencies I assign per area too. I go a little broader that just one county at a time though. I'll assign the control channels of several counties at once. More like a regional area. That way even if a transmission is hitting off a tower in a neighboring county, I still hear that traffic. This way seems to work for me, but I too would be curious how other people set up and organize their channels.

[jamesa53]

Originally Posted by aliby19

Another question -- Does a county's talkgroups only identify with that county's towers? Basically what I'm asking is if I could receive Morgan County traffic on Monroe County towers?

Thanks!

A radio can affiliate with any tower if close enough. For example here in Vigo County, traffic from Vermillion, Clay, Sullivan and Parke (adjacent counties) can be heard on the two Vigo County towers. Sullivan County which is South is usually heard on the south Vigo tower.

[djl998]

Originally Posted by aliby19

Another question -- Does a county's talkgroups only identify with that county's towers? Basically what I'm asking is if I could receive Morgan County traffic on Monroe County towers?

Thanks!

Generally, local agencies' radios can affiliate with towers in any county adjacent to theirs. So yes, you could theoretically have Morgan County traffic come across a tower in Monroe Co if a Morgan Co radio is affiliated on the tower. That may or may not happen on a regular basis. Where I am, you can sometimes hear Henry Co SD traffic on the Muncie tower from time to time.

[in53scan]

On a related note about SAFE-T programming, I have some questions about the GPS feature in the 996T. I have a 996T mounted in my car, and would like the scanner to switch towers/sites automagically as I travel based on distance from the towers vs. me having to press a lot of buttons while driving to switch sites.

The 996T seems capable of this with a serial GPS add-on, but I'm not looking forward to programming all of the tower coordinates in the scanner; even using the FreeScan or similar software that would be pretty tedious.

If the tower coordinates were all in the RR database, is that something that would import into FreeScan through the RR subscription? If so, adding the coordinates to the database seems like a logical step toward making this programming easier for everyone.

I see there is a spreadsheet / Google Earth KML file from 2007 here in the forums with a lot of tower locations, but it seems like it would be easier to just grab the current list of tower coordinates from the IPSC web site and input them into the RR database. Is this a possibility?

Thanks!

[aliby19]

in53scan, take a look at this forum post: Programming ALL of Safe-T into a 396XT

A few others are already attempting this process and are going to share their files when completed. I started the process but unfortunately I do not have the time to devote to it right now.

Hope that helps.