Iredell County Testing

[fcfd988]

I was in Iredell this afternoon and heard E-Comm doing test counts and testing pagers on EMS 155.205 and also doing test counts on Fire F-1 154.385.

I was in the Ebenezer area near Hwy 21/I-77/Jennings Rd/Statesville Auto Auction

During the testing Ebenezer, Harmony and Cool Springs were dispatched to a grass fire on I-77.

When I first heard the testing I was monitoring on a VHF portable, then on my VHF mobile. While listening on both radios, I heard the same things.......

E-Comm sounded awful. Some transmissions were clear, but most were garbled. Some were completely unreadable. It sounded like they were transmitting from multiple sites at the same time and the signals were not in phase. It reminded me of the Simulcast system that Yadkin uses.

Anybody know what they are up to? I hope for their sake they are not putting in a system like Yadkin has.

Wes

 

[brshoemaker]

I noticed this yesterday as well. I also heard several of the road deputies comment on how bad the sound was.
I thought about calling to complain but I don;t think ECOM would think to highly of that!

 

[BigLebowski]

I had heard from a firefighter up that way that Iredell was putting up a couple more towers to simulcast their dispatches. This was 4 or 5 months ago, so they may very well have it working now.

 

[FireCop]

To echo ATF 1224's comments, the county commissioners had earmarked money to add simulcasting a couple of years back. As early as two weeks ago when I was in Mooresville, they still did not have any simulcast. Let's hope they get the bugs worked out as the most current, or soon to be previous, set up was a pain due to ECOM having to switch towers to transmit to different units and everyone not hearing everyone.

 

[brshoemaker]

Yes, that is correct. The county did put it in the budget after some very damaging tornadoes in the northern part of the county a couple of years ago. A lot of the post storm discussion centered around this.
I'm listening to 155.205 now and the are doing a lot of test counts and tones.
I have heard ECOM make announcements and begin with "Repeating on the northern tower....."
Hopefully this will solve this problem.

 

[Grog]

Maybe they should ask Catawba how they did theirs, it's excellent...

 

[msigmon3306]

Well Grog, I wouldn't exactly call our system "excellent" but it works. We still have some issues hearing transmissions in some areas but overall it's better than what we had. I hope we get simulcast sometime in the (near) future.

Plus comparing Iredell/Catawba = apples/oranges. Iredell is a long rectangle, Catawba is sort of triangle shaped; additionally we are blessed with two mountains in the southeast and southwest sides of the county. Each mountain has a transmitter on it, plus there's a transmitter on the water tower at Oxford Base on Hwy 16 north.

I still don't understand how the system picks which transmitter transmits, it has something to do with which voting receiver captures the signal from a radio--someone once described it as a version of "smartzone". I quit trying to describe it to our medics, I just tell them "it's magic".

EMS doesn't even use the transmitter on 16 N, our units south of Newton can't hear anything coming off that transmitter. If I'm standing outside of Sherrills Ford base and someone is transmitting through the Bakers Mtn transmitter I can't hear them on my portable. But if I key up and tell them to repeat their traffic, my transmission goes out of Anderson mtn and their next traffic will come out of the Anderson transmitter as well--I think.

Our communicators have the capability to force their transmissions to any of the towers but I've never known any time they've had to do it because overall the system works.

 

[sablejon]

Iredell Simulcast

Iredell County's Simulcast System was turned on on Thursday evening and many of the adjustments were finished by Friday @ 1pm. What you heard was the Out-of-Sync audio before the adjustments were made in the overlap areas. The Simulcast system Iredell is using is the Harris Synchrocast, Convex, and Spectracom to bring up their three tower sites. This is the same Simulcast equipment Gaston County is using, and this is also the same equipment that fixed Lincoln County's Quasi-Sync problems. Yadkin is using the Tait Quasi-Sync system also.

Iredell needed the Simulcast because their Emergency Personnel could not talk from the southern part of the county (Mooresville area) to the Northern Part of the county (Harmony area) without relaying through ECOM. Catawba County doesn't have Simulcast - yet....

There are still some adjustments that will be taking place over the next week on the Console audio and the JPS Voter audio, but I drove around the County all weekend and you should hear a huge difference between Friday mornings transmissions and what you're hearing now.

Jon Sable
Two Way Radio of Carolina, Inc.

 

[pboy]

Thanks Jon for providing the first hand information!

Great to get all the interesting details.

Please visit again.

 

[msigmon3306]

Jon taught me everything I know about radio. Okay, he TRIED to teach me.

 

[brshoemaker]

Thanks John. I appreciate the information. I just got back from vacation (yes I took my scanner with me) and I could tell a huge difference. Good work.

 

[FireCop]

I worked over the weekend in Iredell and noticed a huge improvement over the pre-simulcast system. All units from north end to south end were loud and clear!

 

[brshoemaker]

Issues

As i was listening to the countless fireworks calls last night, I was disturbed by the poor quality on 453.650. Some of the deputies complained too. The reception problem seems to be in the southern part of the county. Anyone know what's going on?

 

[jeffmulter]

Considering when you were listening to the Iredell Co Sheriffs, my first guess would might be interference from Greenville County, S.C.

Greenville (the city) has a repeater on 453.650 / 127.3 ... the same frequency AND P-L tone as the Iredell Co Sheriffs' channel. Greenville City's fire department uses the channel, and every fire department has more calls on July 4th.

If you listen for them, I would expect you could catch Greenville Co UHF traffic from their FD, EMS, PD and S-O many mornings and evenings during the week. They are fairly consistent here.

 

[FireCop]

Jeff I had that thought of Greenville being the culprit cross my mind as well. They are a nuisance to hear during the skip season when ICSO isn't transmitting.

 

[SD70MAC]

Iredell

It has got better but this was a B-I-G mistake to put in this system. It will alway give trouble even though the radio guys are tring very very very hard to fix it. This blunder will be used in the future to force everyone into going to an over priced 800 system that the VFD's cannot aford to do. Alot of VFD fire men own and maintain there own radios at no cost to taxpayers. The system that was in place worked good even though not perfect .

 

[FireCop]

I listened in today on ICSO. I didn't notice any bleedover from Greenville, SC. I did notice a beep at the end of several of their transmissions. It reminded me of the beep at the end of an EDACS transmission on 800 conventional, but not quite the same. Anyone else hearing this? I didn't notice it on fire or ems channels.

 

[KM4WLV]

Are they using any Kenwood Equipment over in Iredell? I know the Kenwood TK2180 & 3180s you can set up a "roger beep" to sound at the end of the transmission. I know here is Rowan some of the volunteer guys use Kenwood, but the county and city is married to
/\/\other /\/\oto. Can anyone from Iredell elaborate on this. I know for a fact in Davie Kenwood is pretty big, as I used to work for the shop that did a good bit of work for the depts over that way.

 

[FireCop]

As far as I know, all dept. or county owned radios are Mother Moto. Anyone using a Kenwood would have to be using their own radio. As far as the radio beeps you describe, I don't think that's it. It may have something to do with how the radio techs have tweaked on the simulcast system.

 

[SD70MAC]

Beeps

I listened in today on ICSO. I didn't notice any bleedover from Greenville, SC. I did notice a beep at the end of several of their transmissions. It reminded me of the beep at the end of an EDACS transmission on 800 conventional, but not quite the same. Anyone else hearing this? I didn't notice it on fire or ems channels.

The only sounds on EMS and Very limited use on fire is MDC1200. I have my moto's set up for ID decode and EMS and rescue use MDC1200 but not all. If they are talking to I MED 10 they show up as I.D. 0010. Most SD units use MDC and very few fire use this. Hope this helps.