New Orleans' North Simulcast LWIN Site Misbehaving?

[andyadler]

Hello everyone. Over the past few weeks, using my Uniden 396xt, I've noticed a great many P25 signal dropouts while monitoring via the North Simulcast site, which had been working perfectly up to then. Oddly, I have no problems when on the Pan Am site, but the coverage (and affiliation issues) is not nearly as broad as North Simulcast, particularly when in the Metairie area. I haven't changed any settings on my 396XT, checked to make sure Close Call and any priority functions haven't been accidentally toggled, etc.

Anyone else experiencing odd glitches on North Simulcast? I'm ggoing to play around with the 396xt's P25 threshold settings to see if I can fix things, but wanted to check in here first.


Many thanks in advance...A.

 

[loumaag]

It is the nature of simulcast sites that you will get the same signal from more than one place at (almost) the same time. In the analog days, this was not much of a problem as this was not really noticeable to your ear, but in the digital age, where the chip expects to see a certain pattern, any deviation causes the error correction subroutines to kick in. While the commercial radios are able to handle this multi-path reception a bit better than your scanner they also sometimes have the same problem. The easiest solution for you is to engage the attenuator and cut the signal strength by 20dB (yes I know it sounds wrong, but try it), other solutions are to block multi-path reception with directed antennas, or use another non-simulcast site.

 

[andyadler]

Well, looks like all that was amiss was my squelch setting jumping from 4 to 14 -- a consequence of connecting the 396XT to the RH-96 head unit. Thanks for listening...A.