Another Anomaly! Antrim County Fire Dispatch is being weird

[nvanw27]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been monitoring the Antrim County Fire Dispatch feed from my home on the Grand Traverse/Wexford county line. I can pick it up fine from 40 miles away!

Anyway, there’s something weird going on. When toning out a department, the two-tone will go out TWICE, once crystal clear, and then once static-ridden. Then, the dispatcher will instruct the department, then it’ll come through AGAIN, static riddled and with a beeping tone (similar to a Kenwood radio error tone) playing over & over in the background.

What is going on here? Am I going crazy? Are there multiple repeaters I’m getting? Any help, as usual, is appreciated.


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[RFI-EMI-GUY]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been monitoring the Antrim County Fire Dispatch feed from my home on the Grand Traverse/Wexford county line. I can pick it up fine from 40 miles away!

Anyway, there’s something weird going on. When toning out a department, the two-tone will go out TWICE, once crystal clear, and then once static-ridden. Then, the dispatcher will instruct the department, then it’ll come through AGAIN, static riddled and with a beeping tone (similar to a Kenwood radio error tone) playing over & over in the background.

What is going on here? Am I going crazy? Are there multiple repeaters I’m getting? Any help, as usual, is appreciated.


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I wonder if they have a simplex repeater set up some distance away to repeat the dispatch, and you are getting both due to some tropo ducting.

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[KevinC]

Sounds like a "parrot repeater" to me.

 

[nvanw27]

Sounds like a "parrot repeater" to me.

What exactly IS a parrot repeater?


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[KevinC]

What exactly IS a parrot repeater?


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A simplex repeater as RFI-EMI-GUY suggested, see the link below...

ADS-SR1 Simplex Repeater, Argent Data Systems

 

[Golay]

My first guess after reading the OP is there are two sites.
First the page and call is going out on the site closest to the OP.
Then the next is going out on the site further from the OP.
If for some reason he lived on the other side of the county, the scratchy one would be first. Possibly for some reason, they have chosen not to simulcast the paging. Like I said, this is the first thing crossed my mind when I read the OP.

 

[nvanw27]

That would be my guess. Sometimes the dispatcher phrasing is different on the static feed, eluding to a possible second frequency? They haven’t touched the MPSCS for Fire com to my knowledge, so that doesn’t seem like it’s what’s happening.


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[ncarpenter]

It's a simulcast radio system. You're hearing it the first time crystal clear because it's using the simulcast system, which transmits over all towers throughout the county at the same time. You're then hearing a weak signal because they are also transmitting a second set of tones from a single tower sight (non simulcast) as redundancy against the simulcast system.
The beeping you hear is a power failure alert (a quick two-beeps every 10 seconds). It's beeping simply to indicate that it is either currently on battery power, or had some sort of power fault. It requires a visit to the site each time to reset it, so it doesn't get reset too often.