Best Antenna for Mass State Police Zone 5

[bh]

I'm looking for the best antenna for receiving the Massachusetts State Police 800MHz system along the east coast of the state. I currently have a BCD436HP with the Radioshack 800MHz portable antenna, but I find that I lose signal often and hear LOTS of static during my commute from the NH border down Route 95 and Route 93 to Boston.

Can I get better signal with a better antenna, or is reception just bad in these areas? If the latter, how do MSP cruisers deal with such bad reception? What are they doing differently than me?

 

[bobsav21]

scanners

I'm looking for the best antenna for receiving the Massachusetts State Police 800MHz system along the east coast of the state. I currently have a BCD436HP with the Radioshack 800MHz portable antenna, but I find that I lose signal often and hear LOTS of static during my commute from the NH border down Route 95 and Route 93 to Boston.

Can I get better signal with a better antenna, or is reception just bad in these areas? If the latter, how do MSP cruisers deal with such bad reception? What are they doing differently than me?

They dont use scanners

 

[bh]

Forgive my lack of knowledge here, but are you implying that their radios are more powerful than today's top of the line scanners like the BCD436HP? How does the radio itself affect signal reception?

 

[bobsav21]

Yes

Forgive my lack of knowledge here, but are you implying that their radios are more powerful than today's top of the line scanners like the BCD436HP? How does the radio itself affect signal reception?

Yes

 

[13CA350]

I'm looking for the best antenna for receiving the Massachusetts State Police 800MHz system along the east coast of the state. I currently have a BCD436HP with the Radioshack 800MHz portable antenna, but I find that I lose signal often and hear LOTS of static during my commute from the NH border down Route 95 and Route 93 to Boston.

Can I get better signal with a better antenna, or is reception just bad in these areas? If the latter, how do MSP cruisers deal with such bad reception? What are they doing differently than me?

May I ask what car you have? A good magnet mount could help, but living in New England I'd be worried about corrosion.

I bought my antenna from Amazon and I'm pleased with it. It's a Tram 1091 NMO mount, but it comes with a piece of angled metal you can use to mount it to anything. I mounted it to the side of the trunk in my 2009 Jeep Liberty, and it works great. I listen to the State Police and catch them just fine, but there is occasional static. It could be because of my location (Middlesex County) or the way I mounted it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DY8FTR8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I'd recommend a trunk lip mount antenna if I were you. DX Engineering has a wide selection of mounts available.

 

[garys]

The MSP radios are much better than any commercial scanner. Part of that is the fact that they only work on 800. A scanner has to be designed to cover all of the bands it receives, plus it's built differently. More filtering, a frequency specific receiver section, and so on.

If you are using a portable antenna inside your car, then that is also going to negatively effect reception. Just about any antenna mounted outside the vehicle is going to work a lot better.

If you tell us what you are driving, we can probably offer some more specific suggestions for an antenna. Use a Hustler MOR, but the same antenna comes with trunk and magnetic mounts. I'm not a big fan of magnetic mounts in general, but it might work for you.

 

[cg]

A vehicle mount antenna will work better in many locations than one mounted on the scanner.
You need to realize that a scanner that is built to work good all bands will not work real well on any one band. Also, the scanner is much more prone to overloading from high power RF sites like cellular sites. I would imagine you lose the signal when you are closer than 1000' to a cell site.
Commercial radios are designed to switch to a stronger tower site as the received signal fades. They are also built to receive on a narrower range of frequencies which allows for much better filtering of unwanted signals.
Be sure that you have the active sites that are closest to your location as you travel. You might look at interfacing with a GPS to take advantage of location based scanning.

chris

 

[RKG]

Not only are $7000 radios better receivers than $500 radios, but within the A/H patrol area, there are a number of infill sites (using different control channels) running to pick up known coverage gaps, one of which is the upper portions of Rt. 95. Motorola SmartZone radios will detect that they have lost the Zone 5 control channel and switch to one of the infill sites (until that control channel is lost). In the process of switching, the MSP radio will, via "affiliation," tell the system that they are on the infill site and have selected talkgroup X, and the controller will cause audio on any other site passed on a channel grant to that talkgroup to be repeated over the infill site.

And, for the record, there are some coverage gaps that have never been fully addressed; for example, Rt. 128 alongside Prospect Hill and Rt. 2 approaching Rt. 495 from the east.

 

[ecps92]

Yes - the radios used by Public Safety are Commercial Grade.
Your Scanner is not built/designed to commercial grade. [Motorola / GE / EFJ / Harris etc]

Remember your radio is a hobby.
I would suggest trying an 800 Mhz Only antenna.

Also keep in mind the MSP do have some dead spots, which is why their radios automatically change zones as needed.

ie: See Zone 20 and many of the other Inteli-Repeater sites that are used to fill-in coverage gaps

Forgive my lack of knowledge here, but are you implying that their radios are more powerful than today's top of the line scanners like the BCD436HP? How does the radio itself affect signal reception?

 

[ecps92]

+1 Bob

And there will always be coverage gaps and your Cellphone does not have Nationwide Coverage - regardless of what the vendor tells you :roll:

Not only are $7000 radios better receivers than $500 radios, but within the A/H patrol area, there are a number of infill sites (using different control channels) running to pick up known coverage gaps, one of which is the upper portions of Rt. 95. Motorola SmartZone radios will detect that they have lost the Zone 5 control channel and switch to one of the infill sites (until that control channel is lost). In the process of switching, the MSP radio will, via "affiliation," tell the system that they are on the infill site and have selected talkgroup X, and the controller will cause audio on any other site passed on a channel grant to that talkgroup to be repeated over the infill site.

And, for the record, there are some coverage gaps that have never been fully addressed; for example, Rt. 128 alongside Prospect Hill and Rt. 2 approaching Rt. 495 from the east.

 

[ranchboy]

They dont use scanners

Actually MSP cruisers do have scanners.

 

[garys]

They do, but not as their primary means of communication. Some troopers use them, some troopers don't. The ambulances I used to work in had two UHF radios, two 800 Mhz radios, and... a scanner. Using the commercial radios was mandatory, using the scanner was optional.

Actually MSP cruisers do have scanners.

 

[ecps92]

Yes - but not for monitoring their own system, which is what we are conversing about, so.... No they don't .....
They use the Motorola assigned radios [Mobile, Portable, Base]

Actually MSP cruisers do have scanners.

 

[bh]

Great advice, thanks everyone.

Some areas that are particularly bad seem to be all of Rt 1 between Boston and Peabody, and the stretch of Rt 93 between Rt 95 and 213.

I drive a Toyota Highlander so I will look into mounting options for an external antenna; however, one issue I have found is finding a mount with a cable length long enough to go through the length of the SUV to the front area.

Outside of a better antenna and assuming this is the only system I am interested in monitoring, are there better scanner or radio options that may be specifically tuned to receiving this band?

 

[garys]

You probably won't want to do it this way, but the times I've used a handheld in my wife's Highlander, I've used a mag mount routed into the car through the left rear door area. Without drilling a hole through the roof, which you might not want to do, the rear hatch area is good, but will run into the cabling problem you mention.

Without using an external antenna of some kind, any radio you use will have some issues with reception. There are people who use the Unication radios, but I have no experience with them. There is sub forum for that radio brand here, so you might want to take a look.

Great advice, thanks everyone.

Some areas that are particularly bad seem to be all of Rt 1 between Boston and Peabody, and the stretch of Rt 93 between Rt 95 and 213.

I drive a Toyota Highlander so I will look into mounting options for an external antenna; however, one issue I have found is finding a mount with a cable length long enough to go through the length of the SUV to the front area.

Outside of a better antenna and assuming this is the only system I am interested in monitoring, are there better scanner or radio options that may be specifically tuned to receiving this band?

 

[garys]

You may want to think about an on glass antenna. I don't know if you can put one on the windshield in your Highlander, but if you can, it might be an option.

 

[federal40]

I've used these discontinued antennas by Antenna Specialist for quite some time. You can get them for cheap, $5 w/ free shipping. It'll definitely outperform an HT antenna inside the car.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Antenna-Sp...531947&hash=item1ecb54e953:g:gSUAAOSwlRpZZ~gb

It provides a clean install and, so long as the portion of glass on which you desire to mount the antenna has no infused metal particles or metallic-based tint, you should get some decent performance in parts of MA. As for the areas you stated, I cannot attest to reception quality with a scanner. I have a Whistler 1095. Even with my Whistler in other parts of MA, it's a far shot in performance (sensitivity, filtering, etc.) when compared to an actual Motorola rig that I use in lieu of it for monitoring MSP. A scanner is not a professional-grade, quality piece of equipment that runs in the thousands, so it cannot be expected to perform like one.

 

[garys]

There are a number of on glass antennas out there. There are even a couple that mount inside the vehicle. They'll likely be better than just using the rubber duckie, but they won't be as good as one mounted outside the vehicle.

The might be just good enough for bh's purpose.