Ocean County Trunked System Help

JMM8586 · Feb 23, 2017

Ok so I'm a little new to this. I have 2 rtl-sdrs. I'm able to listen two other trunked systems in my area, specifically State Police Troop C. Ocean county's control channel is 508.4375mhz. The signal health is 100 percent the and the site window pops up with all the info. The problem is in unitrunker, the control channel comes up as 867.38750. The system log indicates that voice calls are coming through but won't tune the other dongle to the voice frequencies. It sits parked at 0.00. This has been driving me nuts. Any help or info would be greatly appreciated.

Here is a screen shot

help1.png Photo by JMM8586 | Photobucket

Thank you again!

elias1988 · Feb 23, 2017

Try unchecking the chase option, as for following voice try my info:

JMM8586 · Feb 25, 2017

struggle bus

Thanks for the reply. I'm still not able to get the Ocean County System here in Brick. I'm racking my brain here. It seems the control channel changes to a frequency of 867.38750 for no reason. The voice tuner fails to change. I'll give you the screen shots. Thank You for any help. I just want to listen to Ocean County. It seems like your running the same setup here.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f296/JMM8586/help2.jpg

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f296/JMM8586/help3_1.jpg

Is that screen shot you gave me recent, are you able to listen to ocean county?

elias1988 · Feb 25, 2017

Yes the screen shot is recent and I can follow voice. This is how I have my receiver set up and it works fine:

JMM8586 · Feb 25, 2017

I seem to have everything set up right but the frequencys show up in the 800mhz band. The voice frequencys should be between 505-509 for the ocean county system. Other sites work but for some reason the control channel changes to 867mhz even though I have it set right. I've tried every setting and now I'm wondering if it's my computer. I'm running windows 10 on an Lenovo laptop with a USB hub attached

GTR8000 · Feb 25, 2017

If you're seeing 800 MHz frequencies, it means you haven't properly setup the band plan in Unitrunker. Type II systems do not broadcast the band plan over the control channel like P25 systems do, so you have to fill them in manually. It looks like you've got the 800 MHz band plan selected, which is obviously incorrect.

elias1988 · Feb 25, 2017

Band plan shouldn't have to be set up,that's how I have it and it works fine.

GTR8000 · Feb 25, 2017

elias1988 said:
Band plan shouldn't have to be set up,that's how I have it and it works fine.

Let me be clear: If the correct band plan is not setup in Unitrunker, the program will assume that it's an 800 MHz system, and will change the frequencies accordingly. That is why the OP is seeing 800 MHz frequencies for a T-Band system.

If you could, please post a screenshot of the Band Plan screen for that system.

GTR8000 · Feb 25, 2017

JMM8586, pending Eli posting a screenshot of the band plan, try this:

Stop decoding. Delete all of the frequencies for the system. Go to the Band Plan screen in the site window. You will see a bunch of entries with 800 MHz base frequencies. Delete them all.

Once that screen is blank, click the + button to add an entry. Now click into the Base field, click the button that has a hand holding a pencil, and you'll be able to edit the field. Click back into Base and change that to 505.000, change Lo to 380, Hi to 759, Spacing to 12.5, Slots to 1. Click the hand/pencil icon again to get out of edit mode. Now click the lightning bolt button to apply the changes.

Once you start decoding again, the frequencies should come up correctly in the 500 MHz range.

elias1988 · Feb 25, 2017

Is it different for 900 MHz Type II systems? Band plan for the Jersey Central Power & Light system comes up automatically.

GTR8000 · Feb 25, 2017

elias1988 said:
Is it different for 900 MHz Type II systems? Band plan for the Jersey Central Power & Light system comes up automatically.

Unitrunker has some built in coding that generally recognizes 800 and 900 MHz system band plans automatically, because they use standardized FCC channel #'s and offsets. Rebanded systems are a bit different, and sometimes require the use of the Unitrunker Band Plan Wizard to add the extra entries needed for the new 851-854 channels (side note: the NJSP system was rebanded, but uses "old" channel #'s, which is why it works even with older scanners that are non-rebandable)

Getting back to the OP's issue...VHF and UHF Type II systems don't have a standard band plan, which is why custom frequency tables have to be setup in many scanners, as well as Unitrunker. P25 systems broadcast the band plan over the air, so none of this headache comes into play.

elias1988 · Feb 25, 2017

I see,thanks.

GTR8000 · Feb 25, 2017

No problem.

RR shrinks down attached images, but it appears that your band plan is completely blank?

I can only assume that at some point you manually entered each frequency as they came up as 0.0 MHz, changing them to the appropriate 500 MHz frequency?

That method works, but wouldn't really be considered the "preferred" method. That's how we would setup EDACS systems in Unitrunker, since they don't use band plans.

elias1988 · Feb 25, 2017

Yes did manually add the frequencies in. I'll add the plan in since i get false or blank frequencies from time to time.

JMM8586 · Feb 25, 2017

Wow thanks for all the replies! I will try it when I get home from work tonight and let you know how it works. I really appreciate the help you guys really know your stuff!

JMM8586 · Feb 26, 2017

Ok so far I have it working for the most part. I at least got to listen to the road department and park security in this county. I have a few questions for you, 1. How did you figure out what to set the park frequency on the voice receiver? 2. How did you figure out the band plan specifically the Lo and high and slots. Radio Reference for this system gives the base frequency of 505mhz the low of 505mhz high of 509.7375mhz with an offset of 380. Just trying to figure this out for future reference. Next project is the NJ NJICS with DSDplus

GTR8000 · Feb 26, 2017

The Band Plan screen should look like this after you clean it up and add the correct entry:

You also want to optimize your signal and voice receivers so that they're only doing as much work as necessary. This includes disabling all protocols except for Motorola.

Optimize your signal receiver as follows (you may also want to enable the Chase feature, in case the control channel changes):

And your voice receiver as follows:

GTR8000 · Feb 26, 2017

JMM8586 said:
1. How did you figure out what to set the park frequency on the voice receiver?

Set the voice receiver park frequency to 0.0. It will automatically go idle when there is no activity. Make sure to set a squelch that is 10-15 points below the average RSSI for the voice channels. So if you normally see 60 RSSI when voice is active, set the Squelch for 45-50.

JMM8586 said:
2. How did you figure out the band plan specifically the Lo and high and slots. Radio Reference for this system gives the base frequency of 505mhz the low of 505mhz high of 509.7375mhz with an offset of 380. Just trying to figure this out for future reference.

I've got a lot of experience with these systems and calculating band plans. I can basically do them in my head at this point. The Custom Frequencies Table in the database for the system is a good starting point. As you can tell, everything we put in the band plan in Unitrunker matched up, with only the Hi channel that needed to be filled in.

JMM8586 said:
Next project is the NJ NJICS with DSDplus

P25 systems are considerably easier, since the band plan is broadcast over the air on the control channel, so that will automatically fill itself in correctly in Unitrunker.

JMM8586 · Feb 26, 2017

apparently the NCICS system is P25 phase 2 which from digging around unitrunker does not support. So if i just plugged in the band plan "505 base, 505 low and 509.7375 high" it would have worked? I'm going to do a little research about the frequency tables and band plans. This is alot to take in but I enjoy learning about it.

GTR8000 · Feb 26, 2017

JMM8586 said:
apparently the NCICS system is P25 phase 2 which from digging around unitrunker does not support.

Unitrunker supports signal decoding of P25 Phase II systems, however DSD+ does not support Phase II voice decoding yet, so it's a moot point. In other words, even if Unitrunker supported Phase II voice following, there's no software to send it to for decoding.

However note that not all talkgroups on the NJICS system are TDMA (Phase II), some are still FDMA (Phase I). Look for a T (TDMA) or D (Digital, i.e. FDMA) in the mode column to determine which is which.

JMM8586 said:
So if i just plugged in the band plan "505 base, 505 low and 509.7375 high" it would have worked? I'm going to do a little research about the frequency tables and band plans. This is alot to take in but I enjoy learning about it.

No, that would not have worked. The band plan is specific to each system/site. Also, only the Base field in Unitrunker is a frequency. The Lo and Hi fields are channel #'s, not frequencies.

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