Metro Area Signals

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SCPD

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It's 2300 hrs and how is everyone's ARMER monitoring in the Metro going?. I think the humid weather is playing havoc in some areas. Having tons of issues on multiple scanners when normally they are decoding fine.
 

johnmoe1

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Dakota County, MN
Looks pretty normal to me. I can often get large changes by moving my antenna a couple of inches.

I am in sort of the middle of Dakota County and here is how my radio did decoding control channels for the past 10 minutes (anything in the mid-90s and above is probably good enough):
Rice 100.0%
Anoka 99.2%
Dakota 99.2%
Ramsey 97.3%
Dakota_East-Washington 96.2%
Hennepin_East 95.0%
Minneapolis 93.4%
Carver-Scott 85.7%
Goodhue 82.4%
Hennepin_West 75.1%
Minneapolis_City_Center 61.0%
 

SCPD

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It's weird tonight. Sites that are pretty much useless due to simulcast silliness are coming in great, sites that are normally fine are having difficulties. There is a big change in the weather coming in for the weekend that will drop the humidity so who knows. Nothing has changed on my end.
 

johnmoe1

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I have my own custom SDR-based "scanner*". Each control channel broadcasts 2400 messages / minute. That number is the percentage that my software decoded (with a valid checksum) during a 10 minute period.


* I don't have a better name for it, but it doesn't actually scan. It constantly receives everything between 851 MHz and 861 MHz and decodes all active channels simultaneously.
 
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aaroncoates

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Jan 5, 2012
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inver grove hts
more Dakota Co

Live in IGH. I have Dakota programmed using the Dak Co Simulcast. PD1 PD2 come in fine. PD3 not so good sometimes. Any suggestions?
 

JASII

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You may want to search through previous posts to see what others have tried in the past. Do you have the most current firmware? You might want to consider a different antenna. Ironically, sometimes less is more when listening to ARMER. By that I mean try any other antennas that you may have lying around, even if it is for other bands The way the system is designed you are likely getting signals from more than one site, thus the receiver has difficulty decoding it. Also, since you have a portable, try moving the scanner a few inches one way or the other to see if the reception changes. Some people have even had good luck listening on other sub-systems. For example, try monitoring DK L MAIN 3 from the Ramsey County site.
 

johnmoe1

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Dakota County, MN
Small antenna move for distant signal

I now actually record statistics from my radio and can make pretty pictures, so I can now make changes and hope to be able to see what happened. The graph shows the number of control channel messages decoded correctly per minute (averaged over 15 minutes). Perfect reception is 2400 messages/minute.

Just before 1:00 am, I moved my antenna 2 inches west. It improved my Minneapolis N/S reception from ~80% of control channel messages properly decoded to 97%. Minneapolis City Center got worse.

If only I could find the spot where everything comes in clearly. :)
 

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8VSB

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Minneapolis
Johnmoe1, do you have any interest in sharing your custom SDR solution? It looks impressive.
 

johnmoe1

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Dakota County, MN
Johnmoe1, do you have any interest in sharing your custom SDR solution? It looks impressive.

Maybe someday. It is a bit of a mess right now. It also has fairly steep requirements right now. It requires a bladerf device and a quad core i5 or better (maybe just slightly less) running linux.

It is just meant as a fun project to play with for a while.
 
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