Good evening,
well it appears that the CPD trunk system is off the air, in recent years there was not much use of it expect the Marine unit. Thoughts?
During the "old days", you would have to dedicate 1 scanner to monitor this system due to the amount of activity on there. Narcotics & Gang Teams would be assigned a channel, and if you followed along and took notes, you'd be able to understand important details. Other teams did "buy-busts" where they'd set up surveillance's and do the deed.
We frequently debated on this forum how much information should be disseminated to the public via the forums in regards to this system. To this day, I believe undercover/covert operations were put in jeopardy as a result of some carelessness in postings on here. Encryption was always available, but many of the Stix radios would lose the code when the batteries died so most operations were in the clear.
Some years ago, Nextels were handed out to the teams and that was the beginning of the end. Now we have users streaming, smart phones with scanner apps and my fear is the hobby is heading away from public monitoring. My suspicion is some are monitoring encrypted conversations, why post talk groups for an unmonitorable system? That's a risk that some will continue.
It was a good system, alot of good monitoring and hate to see it go. It will be replaced by the P2/800 Mhz Digital system over time and if we're smart, maybe we can use a little common sense. I don't expect covert operations to be in the clear ever again, but there might be an opportunity this would happen.
Don't stream...don't give them the ammunition to prove the case.
