North Bay Fire/Works/Water/Transit TRBO System?

[mikewazowski]

Has anybody noticed a new City of North Bay TRBO system?

I found the following on Spectrum Direct licenced under various City Departments:

152.075/158.595 rptr1
152.315/159.225 rptr6
153.155/158.730 rptr9
153.410/158.985 rptr7
154.385/159.960 rptr8
153.485/155.925 rptr5
165.480/169.530 rptr3
153.965/158.880 rptr2
153.650/155.310 rptr4

Bandwidth is 7.6khz and emission type is FXEXT which suggests TRBO.

 

[Forts]

Wow... That's a lot of channels, considering 2 time slots per frequency. I wonder if it is an IP Site Connect system, or perhaps Capacity Plus.... or even Linked Capacity Plus.

 

[mikewazowski]

Looks like a 3 site system: Tower Road, Chippawa Tower and Water Tower.

Tower Road appears to be the main site with 5 repeaters. The other sites only have 2 repeaters.

Not sure if its Connect Plus or Linked Capacity Plus but the authorization date for the licenses is May 2012 which falls before LCP was released by Motorola.

 

[uncleblackie]

I don't normally monitor the city works system, but I was told about a year ago by the guys at spectrum communications that they were getting a new system. As they are the company that looks after all the city radio equipment and the authorized motorola dealer, I guess it makes sense it would be TRBO.

My first question to them was would the fire and police be switching as well but they didn't know for sure. As of right now fire and police are still on their own systems and I will start to monitor the new channels for activity and will let you know.

 

[mikewazowski]

Check each site for a continuous control channel:

Tower Road:
Repeaters 1-5

Chippawa Tower:
Repeaters 6-7

Water Tower
Repeaters 7-8

If you find a continous control channel, then it's most likely a Connect Plus system. You can run DMRDecode using a discriminator tapped scanner to get more information on the system.

Fire is switching for sure since they're licenced on a bunch of channels. Police will most likely not be switching as TRBO trunking does not offer encryption and the radios they are currently using are not compatible.

 

[uncleblackie]

So far only occaisional,random, short, maybe 1 second data bursts.
So short that sometimes Freescan isn't even recording any time duration at all.
No continuous control channel.

Will have a look at DMRdecode in the near future once I finish revamping my shack and will update if anything changes.

 

[mikewazowski]

I was up there on Tuesday for a meeting and found a lot of the channels sending TRBO idle bursts.

No traffic noted and everybody seems to be still using their old frequencies.

Could be Linked Capacity Plus.

 

[mikewazowski]

A friend tells me that North Bay FS is supposed to move to the new system on Tuesday.

 

[Muxlow]

Any clue if they will be using privacy or not?

 

[Forts]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.1; Galaxy Nexus Build/JOP40D) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19)

If there are lots of idle bursts happening it sounds like it will be IP Site Connect over Capacity/Connect plus setup.

 

[mikewazowski]

Here's what TAFL showed a few months ago:

Fire:
rptr 1 Tower Road
rtpr 6 Chippewa Tower
rtpr 7 Chippewa Tower
rptr 8 Water Tower
rptr 9 Water Tower

Works:
rptr 5 Tower Road
rptr 3 Tower Road

Parks
rptr 2 Tower Road

Transit
rptr4 Tower Road

I suppose Works, Transit and Parks could have standalone repeaters operating on Tower Road while Fire could have 2 repeaters operating on each site although I seem to be missing a repeater for Tower Road.

I'll have to check TAFL to see if I missed a repeater.

 

[corymac]

NBFD has moved ... Any update on the system and if anyone is currently scanning these frequencies ?

 

[mikewazowski]

A friend said they would be moving last Tuesday and it looks like he's right.

Apparently they're not running encryption.

You'll have to figure out how to run DSD or grab a Motorola radio and grab the system information using DMRDecode.

DSD is the cheapest and easiest way to go but depending on how the system is setup, you might not be able to sort out fire from works, transit and parks.

 

[uncleblackie]

As of this writing, North Bay police are still on their old freqs.
From talking to the guys at spectrum, they did not think they would be moving over to the new system right away.

 

[Forts]

Are police moving to this system as well?

 

[mikewazowski]

I would doubt it. They're using P25 with encryption now and I can't see them giving that up for TRBO.

 

[Forts]

Agreed. That wouldn't make a lot of sense.

 

[uncleblackie]

I would doubt it. They're using P25 with encryption now and I can't see them giving that up for TRBO.

Yeah, that's basically what the guys at spectrum said.
They said their setup is not that old and does what they need it to do for now.

 

[fire4117]

Has anybody noticed a new City of North Bay TRBO system?

I found the following on Spectrum Direct licenced under various City Departments:

152.075/158.595 rptr1
152.315/159.225 rptr6
153.155/158.730 rptr9
153.410/158.985 rptr7
154.385/159.960 rptr8
153.485/155.925 rptr5
165.480/169.530 rptr3
153.965/158.880 rptr2
153.650/155.310 rptr4
Bandwidth is 7.6khz and emission type is FXEXT which suggests TRBO.

It appears that the bolded frequency is from time to time interfering with Clearview Fire as well.

 

[sbatt]

Sorry for the newbie question... is it possible to pick up these frequencies on an analog or trunk-tracking scanner? Or has their recent upgrade effectively hidden them from the general public?