Scanner Traffic Issues

[Salvatorejrc]

If you are running a certain favorites list on an SDS100, or probably any scanner for that matter, in which it contains many many frequencies to be scanned at the same time, will it have more trouble picking up frequencies in that aspect as opposed to if you had a smaller favorites list?

I was running a relatively large favorites lists, and I was curious why it was pretty quiet so I ran a broadcastify stream on my phone with the certain channel I thought was being unusually quiet, and the broadcastify was actually not quiet, meaning that it was the scanner that was. So then I made a small favorites list with that same channel that was unusually quiet and all of a sudden it was flowing with transmissions.

Is this just coincidental or is it actually a thing?

 

[ofd8001]

Imagine the minister shaking hands (pre covid) after church. A crowd of 500 people versus 50. It will take much longer to complete the task.

Scanners are much the same way - it may take a couple of milliseconds to listen to each frequency. If there are more frequencies, more milliseconds are needed to go through the entire list and then start over.

So yeah, that's real life - bigger Favorites List takes longer to cycle through than smaller list.

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

Wow, I like that analogy

 

[Kaleier1]

This is exactly why zip code scanning is worthless. Gee, I am scanning 5000 frequencies why am I not hearing anything? Because all the transmissions are going on while the scanner is someone else looking for activity.

 

[Salvatorejrc]

So there are currently no scanners that are capable of actually playing the majority of the transmissions?

 

[SaSal]

So there are currently no scanners that are capable of actually playing the majority of the transmissions?

They can play them all fine - just not all at the same time..

Hence why its not unusual to find some streamers run several scanners locked to different criteria (TG-Repeater-Band etc).

 

[fredva]

There's always a tradeoff - if you choose to scan many, many frequencies because you are interested in all of them, then you risk missing a transmission that occurs while the scanner is checking other frequencies. If you have a trunking system in your favorites list, that slows down the scanner even more because it will typically spend a whole second or so checking one control channel frequency for traffic on that system.

Some people deal with scanning a lot of systems/frequencies by running multiple scanners in their shack, with each scanner scanning some of the frequencies. But the other way to deal with it is to prioritize - you decide what is most important to you, scan that, and then scan the other stuff only occasionally.

 

[iMONITOR]

This is exactly why zip code scanning is worthless. Gee, I am scanning 5000 frequencies why am I not hearing anything? Because all the transmissions are going on while the scanner is someone else looking for activity.

Zip Code scanning is not worthless, it works quite well if you set it up properly. 5000 frequencies or 5000 talk-groups? Why would you ever scan 5000 frequencies? There's a difference on how it affects scanner speed.

Also using the zip code method you can set a radius (try 2 miles) from your zip code to help control how many systems/frequencies your scanning. You can also toggle various types of services, PD/FD/EMS, ETC.

 

[trentbob]

We have an old saying in The Newsroom, the more you scan, the less you hear. LOL.

 

[kb7gjy]

One county I scan has very few freqs, all analog. It never fails, some fire/medical incident that I want to listen to and dispatch is busy with it and.... That is when the city decides to do 500 traffic stops during the incident, (You can almost hear the frustration in the dispatchers voice, 2 on duty that handle all radio traffic for the county).

It is the nature of the beast.