Old Bridge

[TheLeaper]

Yesterday there was a fire nearby, with units told to go to ' fireground '. I heard no fireground activity. I see no ' fireground ' talkgroup listed. I do see fireground frequencies listed under Old Bridge Township, not on the P25 system. Do they use these channels for fireground? I'm using SDRtrunk. Would I be able to load these other frequencies to hear fireground?

 

[GTR8000]

Smart fire departments do not use a trunked system for interior fireground ops, they use conventional simplex. Old Bridge's 800 MHz fireground channels are listed on the Middlesex County page.

 

[Tech792]

Yes, they use those simplex analog 800 mhz frequencies for fireground. South Old Bridge uses the UHF ones listed.

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

Would I be able to load these other frequencies to hear fireground?

Not unless you're extremely close to the fireground. SDRTrunk will do you no good for low power simplex (or any) conventional frequencies

 

[GTR8000]

The more recent versions of SDRTrunk have NBFM capability, and can certainly monitor analog conventional frequencies.

Fireground is generally low power, especially at 800 MHz, so you'd have to be very close to the incident scene in order to pick them up. If you don't have SDRTrunk's dongle connected to a fairly high gain antenna right in town, you're probably not going to pick much up on fireground, unless some of the mobiles are transmitting at higher power.

 

[TheLeaper]

Thanks. The antenna is a modified discone 30' up on my tower, fed with LDR400. Do I just add these frequencies to the current system programming in SDRTrunk, or create a new system for conventional fire?

 

[GTR8000]

SDRTrunk's primary function is to track trunked system, P25 in particular. You would need to create new channel definitions for anything else such as 800 MHz analog conventional.