Listening to Orange County Fire

[encinorescue911]

I like to listen to fire calls and was wondering how I could set up my scanner to listen to as much of Orange County as possible. I have a discone at 50 feet in Encino and I can hear them. But I also have a beam I got on eBay. I know that there are a bunch of cells and was wondering if I like listn to Countywide will I hear most of everything.

 

[karldotcom]

You can hear OC Fire from Encino? Are you up near Mulholland? If you enter the Countywide cell and all the analog fire groups, you should catch everything...

 

[Eng74]

When I go down south on the 15 you can start getting OC Fire from about the 15-215 split. If I am the other way I can start getting OC Fire at the 5-14 split.

 

[encinorescue911]

Not so well but yes, I'm up on a ridge. I bought a cell phone beam antenna on eBay and it works pretty well. It does great on LAFD when they are using simplex! I can hear Orange County and sometimes Riverside.

 

[zz0468]

Not so well but yes, I'm up on a ridge. I bought a cell phone beam antenna on eBay and it works pretty well. It does great on LAFD when they are using simplex! I can hear Orange County and sometimes Riverside.

Keep in mind that in most 800 MHz systems in the greater LA area, great pains are taken to PREVENT them from radiating too far outside their primary coverage area. The fact that you can hear OC and Riverside county from Encino at all is lucky happenstance. But that's probably going to severely limit just what you can hear. Not all talk groups are broadcast from all sites,

 

[Markb]

I'm pretty sure the Countywide cell is designed to cover a lot of SoCal. Fortunately, most of the fire traffic is on this cell. Santa Ana, Costa Mesa (soon to be OCFA, most likely) and Laguna Beach are on the south cell and like ZZ said, you'll be hard-pressed to hear these guys from where you're at.

 

[encinorescue911]

As I have stated I have a yagi and can hear the countywide cell just fine. So some of the cities aren't carried on countywide, only on their cell?

 

[monitor142]

Correct, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa are on the South Cell. Laguna Fire is on the Laguna cell for talkgroup 5G and 5H is on Laguna and roams on South Cell. The rest of fire is on the Countywide for dispatch and most tacs. MetroNet (Anaheim, Orange, Fullerton) cities will use 2N as a tac for structure fires on the North Cell. Garden Grove keeps their structure fires on their normal tac (2H) as I guess that the North Cell has coverage issues and they actually fall in the Northwest Cell but have opted not to use the few tacs assigned to that system.

The Countywide uses the general category channels (851-861) so they are on mountain tops with 360 patterns at high power and simulcasted. The other cells are using NPSPAC allocations (866-869) which is tightly controlled as far as their reach for frequency reuse with other cities and counties.

Hope this helps.

-M142

 

[LAflyer]

I've heard OC as far north as the Ventura Co line, matter of fact I even heard what turned out to be San Diego RCS a few weeks back while in Malibu.

With the right location reception is possible, and IIRC the OC system actually has a site on Catalina, so it could very well be that is also helping reception in the LA basin for those with a line of sight towards the island.

 

[encinorescue911]

Countywide is dispatched from Loma Ridge and it sees up and down the coast pretty well. I've heard similar stories. But I think Catalina is just for fill-in, right?

 

[monitor142]

Other than an ITAC repeater, OC has one additional conventional tac channel on Catalina called Tan-Cat. It's available to all OC 800 users no matter what service they are. There is no simulcast of any cell on Catalina. As far as listening to Countywide, that is simulcasted on many sites including Santiago Peak, Signal Peak, San Clemente, Seal Beach, Sierra, Fullerton Hills, etc. It is high elevation sites with 360 degree coverage so depending on conditions you can probably hear it all over SoCal. As far as RCS up here, they have a path over the water up here with the right weather as they have sites right on the coast.\

-M142

 

[encinorescue911]

I think I sort of have it. But I am still confused in that not all stations are simulcast from their cells on countywide? They stay on their cells and only county fire stations are on countywide?

 

[Markb]

It's not just county fire on the Countywide cell.

The way OC's system is set up is a little different from the typical Smartzone system. Most talkgroups are locked to a specific cell and don't roam. There are a few exceptions that show up on more than one cell, but either way they have most of the fire talkgroups on the Countywide cell and a few distributed among the other cells, mainly for the purpose of redundancy. If the Countywide cell goes down, each agency has a "trunked alternate" that they would switch to on a different cell.
Costa Mesa, Santa Ana and Laguna operate on the South cell (as mentioned in a previous post). I assume this is to spread out some of the work so the CW cell doesn't get overloaded.
There's some more info on the Orange County Wiki page with specific cell assignment info.

Hope that helped....
Mark

 

[PaulNDaOC]

Countywide is dispatched from Loma Ridge and it sees up and down the coast pretty well. I've heard similar stories. But I think Catalina is just for fill-in, right?

Catalina (Blackjack Mtn) is not one of the Countywide Simulcast sites.

There are a good number of sites on the simulcast systemm in addition to Loma.

Off the top of my head there are: West Coyote Hills (La Habra), San Clemente Reservoir, Signal Peak (Above Corona Del Mar), are other important sites as well as a few flatland sites also in La Palma and Seal Beach, and there a likely more.