Digital Vs Anolg

[qjschum]

I have a Uniden BC125AT, How can I tell what frequencies in my county are digital?

[Spitfire8520]

You should take a look at the RadioReference Database (link above). Seeing that you did not list a location, I took the liberty of searching your past posts and came to the conclusion that you are talking about Burleigh County, North Dakota (ND). Anywhere you see P25 under mode means that it is digital.

It looks like a significant portion of our county operates digital, which your scanner cannot receive. Even if you were to get a digital scanner, the database appears to have marked most traffic as encrypted (I cannot confirm this). This means that you will not be able to hear any traffic as it is federally illegal to decrypt encrypted traffic.

Other than that, anything marked FM, FMN, or AM and does not have encrypted in the description should mean that you are free to listen to those as much as you would like with your scanner.

I hope this answers your question.

[qjschum]

Originally Posted by Spitfire8520

You should take a look at the RadioReference Database (link above). Seeing that you did not list a location, I took the liberty of searching your past posts and came to the conclusion that you are talking about Burleigh County, North Dakota (ND). Anywhere you see P25 under mode means that it is digital.

It looks like a significant portion of our county operates digital, which your scanner cannot receive. Even if you were to get a digital scanner, the database appears to have marked most traffic as encrypted (I cannot confirm this). This means that you will not be able to hear any traffic as it is federally illegal to decrypt encrypted traffic.

Other than that, anything marked FM, FMN, or AM and does not have encrypted in the description should mean that you are free to listen to those as much as you would like with your scanner.

I hope this answers your question.

Thank you!

[vans113]

I can't honestly tell the difference in audio, from analog to digital.

[UPMan]

If you had a BC125AT, like the original poster, you'd easily tell the difference.

[Ed_Seedhouse]

Originally Posted by vans113

I can't honestly tell the difference in audio, from analog to digital.

Well, digital on the public safety bands your scanner listens to is generably quite audible simply because squeezing a digital encoding into the narrow bandwidth available and the noisy nature of the radio frequencies involved is pretty marginal.

Wideband digital such as that encoded onto a CD can be and usually is audibly transparent. Squeezed into 10 or 20 KHZ on noisy radio frequencies it's marginal and can usually be quite audibly different than straight FM mostly because of the extra error correction overhead required that eats into usable bandwidth. The fact that the digital protocols use are also packetized adds to the problems.