Montgomery to reband?

[ka3jjz]

From some discussions on Scan-DC, it seems that Montgomery will be rebanding within the next month or so. Time to update the scanners....

best regards..Mike

[bradam2001]

I work for Montgomery County Trans Dept. I had a 2 way portable radio and I had to turn it in. In our office they have all the 2 ways, portable and moble sitting here for our depart. I haven't heard anything yet.

[W8RMH]

Originally Posted by bradam2001

I work for Montgomery County Trans Dept. I had a 2 way portable radio and I had to turn it in. In our office they have all the 2 ways, portable and moble sitting here for our depart. I haven't heard anything yet.

How do you all communicate if all the radios are sitting in the office?

[bradam2001]

We use Nextels. I sometimes use mine to talk to TMC. Just say we have them and never really use them.
You will never hear us on them.

[bradam2001]

I talked to the one in charge of the radios in our dept. He told me they did reband. I can't confirm right now.
Still haven't got my 2 way back yet. Don't hold me to this in case he don't no what rebanding is

[ka3jjz]

The easy way to tell is to take 15 mhz away from the current control channels. If there's no horrible noise on one of them, they haven't rebanded yet...best regards..Mike

[W1RHW]

They are re-banding, it has been in the works for way too long. No official date set. Also don't be surprised if TDMA is considered within the next year or two.

[dwlipp]

We have been preparing for rebanding for quite some time but the actual rebanding of frequencies hasn't occurred yet; it is scheduled for the end of February beginning of March. At this point essentially all subscribers have been programmed in anticipation of rebanding and there is currently some final pre-rebanding system documentation going on that will wrap up shortly.

A system channel has sometimes been dedicated to support the pre-rebanding activities but those will wrap up in the next few days.

We have noticed that scanners have been behaving a bit differently when monitoring the system recently. My best guess is that some of the pre-rebanding system preparations have confused the scanners when decoding voice calls. My personal 396XT never exhibited any unusual behavior but after reading some suggestions in other threads here I found that with the Uniden scanners that if the End Code Detect option isn't turned on that the scanner won't drop the channel at the end of a voice call; this causes the scanner to broadcast any subsequent voice call assigned to the open channel causing the user to hear messages on other talkgroups.

Toggling End Code Detect off caused my 396XT to start exhibiting the behavior and when I turned it back on it started working normally again. I turn on the Analog & Digital option and the scanner is happy.

As mentioned in this tread and others once the system rebands you will need to have the new control channel assignments in your scanner along with the band plan definition. I have just set up a duplicate system in my scanner so that once rebanding occurs I can toggle off the current system and toggle on the new (rebanded) system.

There are no changes being made to the system infrastructure as part of rebanding (other than changing the frequency assignments obviously). There is a project underway to upgrade the infrastructure but it is completely independent of rebanding and won't go live until long after rebanding is done.

Hope this helps.

[dc_vince]

THANKS for the info, Lt, Lipp. I too have experienced the problem exactly as you have described with MoCo on the PRO-106 and PRO-197. I've pored over the settings in WIN500 and unless I missed it there is no "End Code Detect" toggle. Radio Shack (and GRE for the PSR-500/600) released new CPU firmware, version 2.0 on January 12th, 2012 There doesn't seem to be a listing of the improvements in V2.0 BUT when I updated to V2.0 VOILA, problem solved! My guess is "End Code Detect" (or a functional equivalent) is probably in the update,

[dwlipp]

dc_vince,

Thanks for the information. I don't have any Radio Shack/GRE scanners myself but people are always asking me about scanner stuff, so it helpful to know that a firmware upgrade will make those scanners happy too.

Dallas

[jkahn]

Originally Posted by dc_vince

THANKS for the info, Lt, Lipp. I too have experienced the problem exactly as you have described with MoCo on the PRO-106 and PRO-197. I've pored over the settings in WIN500 and unless I missed it there is no "End Code Detect" toggle. Radio Shack (and GRE for the PSR-500/600) released new CPU firmware, version 2.0 on January 12th, 2012 There doesn't seem to be a listing of the improvements in V2.0 BUT when I updated to V2.0 VOILA, problem solved! My guess is "End Code Detect" (or a functional equivalent) is probably in the update,

I questioned Paul Optiz (Upman) last week about this situation regarding my HP-1, and he said they have the digital end code always set to "on", it is not user available, but mine was experiencing the same problem. Today I was listening to some techs talking at a transmitter site about the same thing, they thought it was a problem between the computers and the transmitters, because it is intermittant.

I, too, have set up a copy of my MoCo system with the rebanded frequecies in all radios, HP-1E, 396XT, 396T and 996T. I have heard no digital repeater traffic noise on any channel (I have all freqs, not just the 4 current control channels and alternates) but I thik the day may be getting close becasue of increased traffic on the tech channels.

JK