Simulcast questions

[DHDaniel]

Good morning, I've got alot to learn, Here in the Houston area we have this TX WARN system. Quite a few neighboring towns are on it as well.
I Live in Baytown and thats my primary interest. There are 4 Simulcast's shown in RR. I have all 4 programmed in my SDS100 along with the Baytown Fire & PD data. This has been working great. My question is do I need to have all 4 Simulcast? They are: Harris County Central, Harris County East, Northeast & Northwest. Baytown is 20 minutes east of Houston, ( Harris County).

Thanks
Dave

 

[natedawg1604]

You need to figure out what sites you can monitor from your location. With a P25 trunked system (whether simulcast or not), your monitoring the control channel of a specific site. With simulcast it's the same, your just monitoring a control channel broadcast across multiple physical sites (cells) on the same frequency.

When I'm traveling or visiting a new location, I often find it easiest to run a custom band search to determine what systems/sites I can hear from a particular location. You can even filter custom searches to just control channels.

If you're gonna be monitoring this simulcast system regularly, you should seriously consider getting a $20 RTL dongle and Unitrunker, that will allow you to monitor ALL activity on a particular site, and help you determine what talkgroups frequently affiliate to which sites.

You may find stuff that is quite interesting to monitor, which you didn't even know existed or is not in the RR database. Also don't always assume the site closest to your agency of interest will carry the most traffic for that agency.

Once you figure out what sites you can monitor from a particular location, park your SDS on 1 site for a while, then monitor another, then another, and go back and forth.

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

My question is do I need to have all 4 Simulcast? They are: Harris County Central, Harris County East, Northeast & Northwest. Baytown is 20 minutes east of Houston, ( Harris County).

No two simulcast systems are created equal. I'd suggest clicking the report link at the bottom of your posting and asking for this thread to be relocated to the Texas Radio Discussion Forum. I believe local feedback is needed to address this question

 

[KevinC]

All you need is the East simulcast.