NXDN in Canton Ohio

Status
Not open for further replies.

mtindor

OH/WV DB Admin
Database Admin
Joined
Dec 5, 2006
Messages
10,362
Location
Carroll Co OH / EN90LN
If you are in the Canton Ohio area, I suspect that you are missing a lot of NXDN traffic unless you have manually found all of the active NXDN and haven't submitted it to the DB.

I say this because last Thursday I had the opportunity to be in Canton and was at the top of Canton Mercy parking garage with my BCD436HP scanning. The 436 obviously doesn't do NXDN, but I know what NXDN signals sound like. I was scanning 450-465 mhz and ran across no less than 15 (closer to 20) frequencies with NXDN signals on them. All of them were very active, being either 24/7 control channels or just very active NXDN frequencies.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a scanner with me capable of scanning NXDN and did not have my laptop / Airspy combo with me. I'm going to try to make a trip up there next month, in the middle of the week and during the middle of the business day with the hope of getting more information about the NXDN signals I was hearing.

If you are in the Canton area / surrounding area and have a scanner that handles NXDN (don't Whistler's do that now?) or you have the ability to use DSDPlus or a combination of SDR# and DSPlus, I'd ask that you scan 450-465 mhz and see what kind of new NXDN stuff you can identify.

And, just in case any of you do not realize, most scanners block 454 mhz during scanning because it's typically paging spectrum. But here in East Ohio the paging on 454 is basically nonexistent and the paging operators have repurposed those frequencies for DMR / NXDN use. So in order to scan [and find] anything on 454 mhz, you have to enable the scanning of 454 mhz during scanning. How you do this in your scanner is something you'll have to figure out.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many of these frequencies are on 6.25 khz boundaries, when many scanners will be scanning 450-465 mhz in 12.5 khz chunks. That means that many scanners would just scan over many of the active frequencies out there.

On my 436, I set the 450-470 band to search/scan in 6.25 khz increments by doing this:

Menu --> Settings --> Band Defaults --> 450.0 | NFM | 6.25 khz

On my 436, I turn off the broadcast screening (which means I enable the scanning of 454 mhz paging spectrum) by doing this:

Menu --> Srch/CloCall Opt --> Broadcast Screen --> Set Each Band --> Pager --> OFF

You could also do:

Menu --> Srch/CloCall Opt --> Broadcast Screen --> Set All Band --> OFF

Again, I don't know how you do this on any other scanner, but most scanners will likely block searching/scanning in the paging spectrum to avoid unnecessary interruptions. This is a bummer if you are in an area where there is DMR/NXDN activity in the paging spectrum, like there is in NEOH.

So, you should investigate how to enable the scanning of paging spectrum on your scanner, as well as investigate how you change the scanning steps from the default of 12.5 khz to 6.25 khz on 450-465 mhz.

Mike
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top