Nc viper range?

[Ethan1373]

I don't fully understand the viper system, but enough to get me going with the unication G5. The crazy thing is The pager will go out of range at 10 miles from the tower,But we have a radio in an ambulance we are working on from over 50 miles away and the radio has full bars on the screen! Are they using different towers closer as they move? O and the radio in the ambulance is a Motorola ApX 6500


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[troymail]

The range of VIPER sites isn't great.... and even worse indoors.

Yes, the radio should (can) switch from tower/site to tower as you travel. However, at times, the pager may not actually be connected to the best/closest tower. This is even more likely if you are using other than the stock antenna.

In my case, I typically MUST use a better antenna to receive any of the two (or 3) towers closest to me. I mostly use the Radio Shack 800 Mhz antenna that I use on my scanners as well.

You can see the location of most sites/towers on this map:
https://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?action=siteMap&sid=7118&type=rr

The system - to my knowledge - is a highway patrol system and provides fairly good coverage along highways with a mobile (vehicle) radio and isn't designed for in-building coverage.

In my area, reception is equally poor on all of my radios regardless of vendor. I am constantly trying to come up with improvements for receptions while at home.

Even users on the system are required to repeat themselves quite often in this county due to poor coverage (based on requests and comments made by the dispatchers).

EDIT --- BTW - where are you located?

 

[cmjonesinc]

I'm not sure exactly how the g4/g5 works as far as sites go but with most radios and scanners you program in all the sites for the area you plan on being in. So perhaps all you need is more control channels programmed. Keep in mind however with a scanner or unication pager if the talk group you are trying to monitor doesn't have a user affiliated to the site you are listening to you won't hear anything. So for example if you were listening to a site in Raleigh and are trying to listen to a Montgomery county talk group you aren't going to hear it unless a radio from Montgomery is affiliated to that tower in Raleigh. In my county (Randolph) we have very good viper coverage. There's a few places out in the sticks that occasionally you have to step outside a building but those were the same places that lacked coverage on vhf. The big difference between the two is my old vhf radio didn't beep "out of range", I just had to find out the hard way when I went to talk.

 

[troymail]

Oh - I failed to mention earlier that. like you, I get out of range alot as well even with the better antenna on the radio. I was just sitting her listening to a fire dispatch... Heard activity on other radios but not the G5 - turns out the radio was at that moment reporting out of range....

 

[lmrtek]

Pagers are nowhere near as sensitive as radios so their range is limited.
That's why paging transmitters need to run far more power
than voice repeaters.
In my area, 800mhz pagers had terrible coverage so they went back to VHF fire pagers.

 

[troymail]

The Unications are EXCELLENT on P25 simulcast systems and not so much on systems like VIPER - particularly as you move away from the major highways (generally) where the towers are and indoors. However, I don't believe that this is necessarily a Unication issue.

 

[Ethan1373]

thanks for the reply! I am in Edgecombe county, in between Pitt co and Wilson co. I see what your saying with the towers being on the highways! And also saw were the talk groups have to be affiliated with the towers! That's answers a lot of questions! I was under the impression that you could program ,for instance a franklin co tower on an Edgecombe county talk group and it would pick up the traffic, btw I have done this and it worked but only with a few transmissions and that was it. Idk may have been a stray ahah


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[troymail]

Sometimes when I am on the road, I'll program both the talkgroups and sites that are for the counties I'll be passing through one to a knob position (example: 4 Brunswick County sites and the Brunswick talkgroups). This way, when I drive into a county, the radio is forced to sites for that county and their talkgroups.

For a trip I just returned from, I put only the talkgroups in a knob position and allowed the radio to select (or more likely HOLD on) a site of it's choice. Most times, it holds the previous site way too long so you don't hear local stuff.