Waukee to Westcom

Just wanted to let everyone know that as of 10am on July 1, Waukee PD/EMS/Fire will say their final goodbye to Dallas County Dispatch and will be live and active on Westcom. My feed will no longer carry Waukee traffic as i do not have a p25 scanner.

Mike,

I have a Radio Shack Pro 2055 trunk scanner, and live in Waukee. Do you know how I might be able to program in this new Westcom 25?

Thanks,
Cameron
K6CAM

k6cam said:

Mike,

I have a Radio Shack Pro 2055 trunk scanner, and live in Waukee. Do you know how I might be able to program in this new Westcom 25?

Thanks,
Cameron
K6CAM

Click to expand...

Your scanner will not do P25 trunking.

Tim

Thanks for the quick response! Looks like the PRO-2096 will do it. Time to upgrade I guess...

One thing i will let you know is that all of Dallas County in the not too distant future appears that it will all go 7/800mhz p25 Phase 2. You might want to make sure the pro 2096 will do phase 2

Thanks for the tip! I'm putting my PRO-2055 on ebay and I'll get something that does digital trunking, Phase 2 in particular. I have yet to get the 2m/440 radio up and running - and need to get tuned into the local ham repeaters. Hope to catch you on the air! 73 - k6cam

Mike,
Thanks for your pointers on the Project 25 / Phase 1 & 2 info. I've been researching things lately and I'm ditching my old RadioShack Pro-2055 scanner. That said, I'm looking at two different handheld scanners, the BCD325P2 and the BCD436HP. Both appear to do P25 and P1/P2 from what I can tell. Prices are close to the same but the 436 looks nicer and has some better filtering from what I'm reading. I think I'm going to go with the 436HP but before I drop nearly $400 I wanted to check with you to see if this would do a good job of covering all of Waukee's services. I like the option of typing in your zip code and downloading all relevant frequencies, versus the USB / Software programming I had to do on the other scanner. Let me know your thoughts and advice, when you have time. Thanks again!
K6CAM - Waukee, IA

sorry for the delay in responding. it's been busy. Yea you made the right choice there. I am going to be upgrading my scanner feed with a 536 mobile edition at some point but will wait till Dallas County transitions to 7/800 statewide system to see if uniden releases anything new by that point. Looks like the timeframe for us going 7/8 is around a year. They have to construct a new tower up by perry first to replace an aging one. keep an eye out for updates from me on that. Also if you want to chat on ham i usually hang out over on 145.190 up in perry. Bunch of us are on from 720-800 during drive time in the morning

Thanks for the reply Mike - Things are going well with the new 436HP; had it a few days now. Just a note, and maybe I'll look to you for advice once you get the 536 up and running; but I'm not hearing any Waukee chatter on the RR talkgroups listed for Waukee. I've heard a few calls go out for some things in Waukee near University and Warrior (near where we live), but those were on Wescom Talkgroup 16 - West Des Moines - Old Police Channel 1 (take note of that). I have yet to do a real "discovery" on that trunk, so if I find something better I'll pass it along. I'll stay tuned, of course, and hope to catch you on the Perry 2m repeater. Thanks again!
-Cam
K6CAM

For what its worth, Westcom dispatches everyone on LAW 1. Just like Polk County dispatch. (except they split some agencies off to LAW 2)

You really wont hear anything on those Waukee channels except for the occasional chatter between units.

The way Westcom has their system set up is causing a lot of confusion on the forums it seems. Each agency has a LAW 1, 2, 3 etc as well as Fire 1, 2, 3 and some other channels. Westcom as an entity also has some 'master' groups that their dispatch consoles reside on. The dispatcher will patch the master LAW 1, 2, 3 groups to the other agencies LAW 1, 2, 3 respectively. Because of this, the group that appears on the scanner display essentially relies on the order they patched them together. I don't know if it's the first selected or last or random. Whichever the case is, it can change any time they redo the patches like when they split an agency off for an incident. Because of this, your scanner may display a group ID that says Clive Law 2 or Urbandale Law 1, but its actually a patch of all of them together. This is a throwback to patching the new and old systems together, they patched them together exactly the same way. The only groups that are actually by themselves are the chat channels like law 4, fire 4, public works etc. But keep in mind, they can patch and and all groups together whenever they want. The only way to know would be to use a utility like Unitrunker to see the patching process and see what flags are set when the call request is made.

Hope some of that helps!