I received a call yesterday from a fellow ham that scans the Sumter County public safety system on a regular basis. He said he stopped receiving the system around 9:00 AM in the morning. Throughout the morning he only heard occasional calls on the old system, and on most of them the dispatcher would come on and remind the caller to switch over to the new system. I confirmed this on my trunk tracker, it would only show it was listening to one of the control channels and no activity from any of the talk groups. On an old non trunking scanner, I heard this old active control channel and another one that sounds similar to the Palmetto 800 control channels. I'm assuming the new system is compatible with the Palmetto 800 in some way. We knew this was coming, but haven't been able to get any details in the last year. Today, there was no old style control channel on the air, and the new one was still on the same frequency as yesterday: 859.4625. No signals of any kind are heard on the other old system channels.
I've been involved in some other projects this week, so haven't really been able to delve into this yet. Hopefully, I'll find some time over the weekend to search the FCC database, find some frequencies, and start relearning how to program my BCD396XT from scratch! Anyone else have any ideas or resources for the new Sumter County digital trunking system?