Reception in Lake County

I live in Willoughby Hills in a high rise apartment, and am having trouble clearly and consistently picking up the MARCS ip system. I have both a flat leaf tv antenna and a tuned tri band mag mount antenna, both which give me terrible reception for some reason. Sometimes channels come in perfectly clear, other times I barely hear much of a conversation at all because it is garbled and drops out. Is this just a reception issue, or a simulcat/muktipathibg issue, and what kinds of antennas are people using in this area that get good reception (that will fit indoors)?

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Something that may work for you

Sounds like a Simulcast issue. What's seems to work the best according to reports, is a directional antenna pointed at the closest tower.

As an example I've included a link to a (low cost) antenna that works for me. One other note, Microcenter also carries BNC adapters, if you need one. I bought mine roughly two years ago, total cost with tax was about $11.

FYI: The antenna can be rotated to Vertical, that works better for me.

Supersonic HDTV and Digital TV Indoor Antenna 927517 - Micro Center

Is there a difference between mast and ltower in lake county. Also does anyone know a very active channel on lake County marcs I can use to judge reception for my directional antenna?

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kr0490 said:

Is there a difference between mast and ltower in lake county. Also does anyone know a very active channel on lake County marcs I can use to judge reception for my directional antenna?

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Click to expand...

A tower is (usually) self supporting and a mast (usually) has guy wires.

It's not about signal strength. It's about getting the clearest reception. The perfect direction to point your antenna could be at the closest tower or it could be pointed in a direction where no towers are located.

Lake County is a Simulcast site, so all of the towers are transmitting the same traffic on the same frequency(s) at the same time.

Technically the CC (control channel) is transmitting all of the time. You don't monitor by frequency like a conventional repeater system. Your scanner is monitoring a P25 Trunk System. So the CC tells your scanner what frequency to use to monitor a TG (talk group).

While monitoring MARCS-IP for Lake County, you should point the antenna in different directions and note how well or poorly you receive voice traffic. You could start by pointing the antenna (North) 12 o'clock and then go to 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock and so on. Noting good or bad reception. Where ever you get the best reception is where it should stay pointed.

I hope this helps.

I tried pointing my antenna in all direcrions, even during a transmission, with no noticeable improvement from my mag mount antenna. Almost all digital channels are so choppy you can not understand what is being said. I don't know how active lake County is, but minus analog channel, I only hear activity on digital channels about 3-4 times an hour combined, and I am monitoring wickliffe, wollowick, willoughby, Willoughby hills, mentor, Kirtland hills. I assume I am not picking up a lot. Any further ideas on helping with my reception?

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Have you tried enabling the attenuator (ATT) on your scanner?

My scanners all get very good reception of Lake County in Willoughby Hills. The tower in Wickliffe (at Euclid Ave. and East 305th St.) should come in easily at your location, but depending on how high you are up in your high rise, you may be also receiving other towers in the system (causing simulcast distortion)... Also, if the high rise you are in is Pine Ridge, there are also cellular towers near you that may be causing interference (it gives my scanners issues when I'm near there)... If your scanner is made by GRE/Whistler/RadioShack, this could be a problem... In either case, turning on your scanner's attenuator might help.

If the attenuator option doesn't help, you will likely need a directional yagi antenna... Most likely you will want to point it north toward the Wickliffe tower. But depending on where you are in the apartment complex, pointing it east (toward the tower at Lakeland College, near I-90 and Route 306) may work better for you.

As for receiving more traffic: without knowing exactly what scanner you own, I can't tell you how to do that. But every scanner has some way of opening up the system so that you can listen to ALL traffic on the system. The Lake County System is very active, so there will be a lot of traffic on it.

kr0490 said:

I tried pointing my antenna in all direcrions, even during a transmission, with no noticeable improvement from my mag mount antenna. Almost all digital channels are so choppy you can not understand what is being said. I don't know how active lake County is, but minus analog channel, I only hear activity on digital channels about 3-4 times an hour combined, and I am monitoring wickliffe, wollowick, willoughby, Willoughby hills, mentor, Kirtland hills. I assume I am not picking up a lot. Any further ideas on helping with my reception?

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Click to expand...

Kevin,

Since Lake County MARCS-IP is a Simulcast site, strong signals from multiple towers are not desirable.

The Lake County MARCS-IP P25 site should be pretty active. You should be hearing traffic for all of Lake County.

Based on your location being in Willoughby Hills, the two closest towers are the Wickliffe at 30825 Euclid Ave and then the Kirtland at 8505 Garfield Rd. The Wickliffe tower should be roughly at your 10 - 11 O'clock direction (Northwest). The Kirtland tower should be at your 1 - 2 O'clock direction (Northeast).

Knowing that, what kind of directional antenna do you have? You shouldn't be looking for more gain (power), you should be looking to receive just one tower. Can you post a picture of your directional antenna?

Just curious, have you tried using the basic rubber ducky antenna? How about turning on the Attenuation for the Lake County system.

On another tack. Do you have the Cuyahoga County MARCS-IP P25 System setup in your scanner? Several of the communities around you affiliate with both the Lake and Cuyahoga systems. So, try monitoring the Cuyahoga System. Post your results. Note: the Cuyahoga System is also located on the Wickliffe tower. Hopefully you'll get a clear or clearer reception.

I didn't think about the cell tower. I live on the top floor of one of the high rises, so I'm likely right below one of the antennas. Anything I can do about that other than attenuation, which I will try this evening?

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If the cell tower is the problem, a filter might help. What kind of filter you buy would depend on which frequencies the cell tower is using.

However, after reading some of your previous posts, I'm assuming you're using a Uniden scanner. I don't own any Unidens myself, but others here say that they aren't nearly as affected by cellular towers like the GRE/Whistler scanners are... So I would think your main issue is simulcast distortion.

Then again, being just a few feet under those antennas may even be a problem for a Uniden. I honestly don't know. The simplest test would be to see if you are able to receive the Wickliffe site on the old MARCS Motorola System. If you can pick that up easily, then cellular interference is probably not your problem.

As for the simulcast distortion issue: I thought about some different possible scenarios as I was going to bed last night... If I lived on the top floor of Pine Ridge (or even Bishop Park), and my apartment windows were on the east side of the building, it would be almost impossible to receive only one tower. The Wickliffe and Lakeland College towers would both come in very strong. That would be an extremely difficult feat to overcome.

Dumb as this seems to you, try completely unhooking your antenna and using your (ATT) feature on your radio. As high as you are, you're likely hearing just about every tower in the county.

Another option is to hook a 50ohm dummy load up to the BNC adapter on your radio.

Another option... Get 50ft of rg-58 coax, run it along the baseboard of your apartment. Terminate one end with a BNC or SMA connector, leave the other end naked as the day you bought it. It connects to nothing. Point is to have it unrolled. Running around corners is a legal move also.

I found an option that has given me a noticeable improvement. I switched all analog traffic over to my hand help bcd396xt (which originally had all lake County on it), and moved the digital over to my bcd996xt. I pick up the digital channels a lot better now. There is still room for improvement though, some garbled traffic still. Will give high attenuation and just a run of coax a try and see what happens.

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kr0490 said:

I found an option that has given me a noticeable improvement. I switched all analog traffic over to my hand help bcd396xt (which originally had all lake County on it), and moved the digital over to my bcd996xt. I pick up the digital channels a lot better now. There is still room for improvement though, some garbled traffic still. Will give high attenuation and just a run of coax a try and see what happens.

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Click to expand...

It drives me nuts to have analog and digital systems in the same group. You miss everything. Nice to have 2 different radios! What analog traffic are you listening for? Just about everything here in Lake County is digital minus some business stuff.

I am listening to both north east cuyahoga and south west lake. Places like willoughby, mentor, wickliffe, kirtland, mayfield, mayfield heights. A lot of cities on East of cleveland are using analog still. For Lake County I mostly heat the fire dispatches on the central fire channel.

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So I unplugged my antenna and just left the coax laying on the floor, and.....the reception is the same if not better than when the antenna was connected, so it likely was multipathing from multiple sites affecting my reception. Thanks for the tip.

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Unfortunately, I don't think there are any consumer-grade scanners out there that PROPERLY decode simulcast systems. They cut corners to keep circuit costs down. That's why professional-grade radios the police use are so expensive; they contain circuitry that PROPERLY decodes simulcast. Those radios rarely have simulcast reception issues, if at all.

There's a guy in Russia who builds something called an ADCR25. It's not like a typical scanner, but it's under 200 bucks, and rumor has it that his devices can handle simulcasting just fine... The one major downside is that they don't do Phase 2... So in the future, when these talkgroups start carrying TDMA transmissions, it will not be able to decode them. That's probably several years away though... I'm hoping to get my hands on one of these ADCR25's someday soon, so I can see how it works for myself...

But I digress. If it were me in your situation, I would start taking more drastic measures. I'd probably start with a highly directional yagi, point it west/northwest, and scan the system with attenuation on. Also, depending on where my antenna is, I would cover the entire east wall and most of the north wall in that room with aluminum foil. I'd try like hell to block out every tower that isn't Wickliffe.

I have no idea if it would actually work or not, but Lake County is (by far) my favorite system to scan, so I'd be really desperate.

If he's in the hi-rise apartments near Bishop Rd (maybe he isn't), the Wickliffe tower would actually be northeast of him. And since the Wickliffe tower is lower in elevation than the Lakeland (Kirtland Hills) tower, he may actually get better reception in his hi-rise off the Lakeland tower. I'm just sayin ... he needs to experiment to find that sweet spot, even if it turns out to be counter-intuitive. Ya never know what may work best in a given situation with those 800 MHz signals bouncing all around.

I am at Pine Ridge near SOM and 90.

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