Rutherford Electric Membership Coop

[brian]

Rutherford EMC used to operate a Motorola 800MHz Smartnet system in Rutherford, McDowell, Cleveland and Gaston Counties that I monitored occasionally. I made a trip to Marion, NC this weekend and determined that this system is now a Motorola Tier III DMR system in the 800MHz band with RAS enabled.

The system ID is 5, and the size code is "S" (small), it DSD+ displays the system as "S5." Note that South Carolina also has a TIII system with a system ID of 5, which is licensed and operated by Motorola called TRBOMAX. It's in the UHF band and uses a size code of "L" (Large") so it displays as "L5".

Based on a very small amount of monitoring, it appears that there are sites in Casar (Site 1, Cleveland Co), Marion (Site 2, McDowell Co), Gilkey (Site 3, Rutherford Co) and Bessemer City (Site 4, Gaston Co). I did not hear any voice traffic on the system in the short time I monitored it.

I will submit this information to the RR database.

 

[jake_Braker]

Brian,
Do you know what frequencies were used at the Gaston site? I'll monitor on DSD and see what I can pick up in my area.

 

[brian]

The neighbor site (site 4) that was reported that I suspect is a site in Bessemer City showed a control channel number of 465, which I think may be 857.3875. That would line up with REMC license WPID292. This is speculative and may not be correct.

 

[jake_Braker]

I'll see what I can find! Thank you!

 

[NCFireman11]

From my limited travels through Marion, I have monitored short transmissions with "base" talking to field units on Talkgroup 13. No clue is if this is systemwide or just for the Marion area.

 

[jake_Braker]

So it looks like the site in Gaston is incredibly weak. I'm not sure if that's just a temporary error or what but I either don't have a connection or the signal is too weak for a decode.
I do have a question for you, how were you able to figure out what county each site was in? That's something I've been trying to figure out with TRBOMAX

 

[trumpetman]

Brian,

I've added some information from my notes to confirm what you found. Looks like 4 freqs licensed per site from the Type II days but I've only ever seen 4 in rotation at Benns now that they're DMR. I seem to recall seeing TGs 11-14 in use systemwide, each one corresponding to a district and were referenced as such over the air (Forest City, Marion, Cherryville, and possibly somewhere else? Once I find my scratch pad where I scribbled down the TGs I heard during a storm I'll add them). Thanks for submitting that.

 

[GMB951]

Interesting