Denver PS on Mt Morris Backup

Denver PS is operating on the Mt Morrison Backup site and ESK Capable Scanners are not tracking it. PRO-197 and PRO-106 show no CC or site data.

Basically the scanners have no information to track.

Key change? Scanning the VC's sounds like business as usual.

The online feed is also silent at the time of this post.

scanlist said:

Denver PS is operating on the Mt Morrison Backup site and ESK Capable Scanners are not tracking it. PRO-197 and PRO-106 show no CC or site data.

Basically the scanners have no information to track.

Key change? Scanning the VC's sounds like business as usual.

The online feed is also silent at the time of this post.

Click to expand...

Online feed is loud and clear now, not sure how long this lasted.

Jim<

Check the archives. By accident I stumbled across the PS system being on Mt Morrison around 10 A.M. 2/26/15 (Nice solid 100% signal up here when they do have it on the air)

Yes it was back to normal when they switched back over to the simulcast setup.

The fact is that they were able to disable scanner tracking when they did this. (why the "Key change" comment in the original post) Was this some kind of test or incidental?

Fired up unitrunker and it sat there unable to deciper the data from both PRO-106 and PRO-197 at my disposal. Checking the archive for transmissions prior to the "radio silence" for yesterday might yield an answer to this question. And no I do not have a broadcastify subscription.

Perhaps a new LCN lineup?

Unlikely. Both scanners showed no information in the channel and site number fields in analyze mode and were silent until they switched back to the simulcast sites. The online feed here was silent during that time as well.

Scanning the voice channels manually during this period sounded like nothing unusual was occurring.

I think this is happening again. Anybody think different?

They have definitely been having ussues with their radios for the past few days. On several occasions my scanner will still track the system but the audio sounds horrible. Even users on the system are complaining about it. Yesterday we were chatting about it on Zello, seems like there might be some sync/timing issues witha few if the sites in the simulcast cluster.

Seems fine now.

It's when they switch to backup that I get nothing. Just like scanlist.

They are definitely on the Mt Morrison site at the time of this post.

The Mount Morrison site has to be using a different ESK key than the "standard" key their simulcast system uses which ESK capable scanners use. I was in a recent discussion in that the old Uniden 396 scanners had/have the ability to change the ESK key setting. The XT models apparently do not.

In any case scanners currently won't track the Mount Morrison PS site.

Still no audio on my scanner at 19:54, has been that way for at leased 3-4 hours.

I hear them on my Uniden 396XLT but my GRE base scanner will not track them, when will they be back on does anyone know ?

Tested a few of my scanners on the Pub Safety EDACS system tonight. Scanlist is right about the ESK. There are certain scanners that are unable to decode the new flavor of ESK they are using. Here is what I have been able to confirm:

Scanners unable to decode:
-GRE/PSR 500 equivalent scanners (i.e. all the ones you can program with Win500)

Scanners able to decode:
-All Uniden Scanners (confirmed on all of the following: BCD396T, BCD996XT, BCD436HP, BCD536HP)

PSR-500 on the Pub Safety Control Channel:
(not working)


PSR-500 on the Pub Works Control Channel:
(working)


BCD396T on the Pub Safety System:
(working)


BCD996XT on the Pub Safety System:
(working)


The new Uniden BCDx36HP scanners don't allow you to park on a CC and monitor activity on the screen, but I can confirm both of mine currently work.

Also, someone might want to try to capture some of the un-filtered audio of the CC in a WAV format and submit to the Unitrunker developer while they are still on Mt Morrison. I'm sure he would be interested in taking a look.

scanlist said:

They are definitely on the Mt Morrison site at the time of this post.

The Mount Morrison site has to be using a different ESK key than the "standard" key their simulcast system uses which ESK capable scanners use. I was in a recent discussion in that the old Uniden 396 scanners had/have the ability to change the ESK key setting. The XT models apparently do not.

In any case scanners currently won't track the Mount Morrison PS site.

Click to expand...

Just heard a DPD dispatcher say they are "back on the normal radio". Bet those with RS/GRE scanners can listen again.

Yes, they are back up , loud and clear on my GRE

Sounds like scanner upgrade time.

Considering Denver is migrating to P25 and EDACS in the metro area will be history within the next year or so I do not see a need to toss the GRE radios in the recycle bin, At least not yet.

Uniden evidently has auto-detection of the ESK "Key" as the now legacy GRE based radios appear to be fixed with the 00A standard. Now it makes sense that some replies in the initial start of this thread were skeptical of what I was observing. Good detective work guys.

The GRE scanners aren't fixed with a certain ESK value. They try to figure it out at runtime based on received data.

However, once they think they've found it, they will keep that value until the current trunking mode "stops" (move to new system, power cycle, exit scan mode, etc.).

In the case of the Denver PS system, if the backup is using a different ESK value, the scanner won't know about it. It will merrily keep using the same old ESK value, and won't be able to decode further CC messages.

If the above doesn't apply to what you're seeing with the GRE scanners (e.g. the lack of CC decode on the backup survives a power cycle), then it would be interesting to see some captures of the CC when this is happening. You can grab these from a PSR-500-family scanner by enabling CCDump and capturing the data from the PC/IF (serial port) interface. In TUNE mode on the CC frequency, the data should look something like this:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 03B 0270162:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E2 0000000:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 7EA 0002101:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E2 0000000:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 03C 0307EAF:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E2 0000000:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 7E4 001FFFF:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E4 001FFFF:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 03B 0270162:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E2 0000000:
EDW:TAAAA:0: 7EA 0002101:
EDW:TAAAA:1: 7E2 0000000:
Of course, the values will be messed up if ESK isn't being handled correctly.

Well hopefully they don't migrate over to P25 Phase-II (right away) and we can put off upgrading scanners a little longer.

Besides, I would never toss a scanner. Even the old ones are good for something. I have some really old ones.