Albany County P25

[KA1RBI]

Please, tell us more about this magical "special built-in programming"! :lol:

Seriously though, there is no such thing. Simulcast multi-path is dealt with on the hardware level in professional radios, not with any software/programming smoke and mirrors. They are able to properly demodulate the signals because they were designed to do so from the start.

Scanners use the wrong demodulation method for LSM/CQPSK. LSM signals cannot pass through an FM demodulator/discriminator stage without irreversible and irrevocable loss of information. For unknown reasons the scanner manufacturers have yet to discover the shocking, unintuitive fact that CQPSK signals must be demodulated ***as QPSK***, not C4FM...

not with any software/programming smoke and mirrors.

100% true. No amount of software processing can recover the corrupted "LSM" signal if the tap point is located at the discriminator output.

73

Max

 

[bob550]

Thanks for all the good feedback.

Same we me here as far as no problem with Schenectady County or Colonie...ever.

Must just be our location fro some reason?

In all my years of monitoring I've never experienced anything like this.

I sort of solved my own reception problem. I switched back to my 20 year-old outdoor eve-mounted discone antenna. When I first began monitoring digital transmissions from the town of Colonie three years ago, I found that antenna just didn't work well at all for that system, and so I abandoned it. Last week, I began using this antenna once again. I have it coupled to a 4-way cable amp for distribution to 3 scanners and an SDR, and Albany County P25 can be received with very little loss. Thankfully, Colonie's use of this system now allows me to hear them as well as Albany. I do find that the amplification tends to overload my PRO-163 and PRO-2006, and so attenuation is necessary on those.

I believe that much of the trouble receiving P25 relates to insufficient signal strength. Analog is far more forgiving in that respect. It's much like what people went through with over-the-air TV reception in the early days of digital, and still experience to an extent. The caveat here is that you can make whatever changes you want to scanner settings, and nothing will help you as much as a strong signal.

 

[sav1350]

Has anyone else noticed that Colonie EMS seems to have changed all of their RID's in the past few days? They used to be just sequential numbers starting with 15014xxx starting at 001 and going up to 119 or so. Now they are 1501XXXY where XXX appears to be the unit number and Y is a portable number or 0 for the mobile.

Also, the EMS Dispatch patch seems to have been discontinued today between Colonie's P25 system and the Albany County system. Perhaps to free up patch resources for Fire?

 

[DaveNF2G]

They can't discontinue the patch unless all CEMS units are off the old system. Otherwise, converted units would be unable to communicate with unconverted units.

 

[sav1350]

The Colonie EMS patch is off. The same patch RIDs are now in use on the fire talk groups. Looks like that started yesterday. There has been no Colonie EMS traffic from County system on the Colonie System since yesterday morning. Guess they finished Colonie EMS and are on to the fire departments.

 

[DaveNF2G]

Now the real fun begins.

BTW, I discovered that some CPD RIDs do not align with the car numbers.

101-112 are off by one (13012402-2413). There is no car 113, so the numbers from 114 match the RIDs.

 

[DaveNF2G]

I just submitted four tickets for updates to the systems that are affected by the ongoing construction of the new system. Unless the DB Admins work inhumanly quickly, these updates probably will not affect this week's RRDB download. Sorry to do it so late, but I was too busy all week to do any scanning before yesterday.

 

[DaveNF2G]

OK, so some DB Admins at least are superhuman.

AFAIK, my submissions from yesterday were completed in time for this week's update.

 

[DaveNF2G]

I guess we have dueling DB Admins for New York. Some of my changes were "undone" by another admin who feels he has better info. I get mine from actually listening to the system (and watching what happens via DSDPlus), as well as interacting with some system users. Not all system users are well informed, of course.

I'll keep posting my updates to the thread so other monitors can make their own decisions as to what seems to match actual real world conditions better.

 

[sav1350]

I guess we have dueling DB Admins for New York. Some of my changes were "undone" by another admin who feels he has better info. I get mine from actually listening to the system (and watching what happens via DSDPlus), as well as interacting with some system users. Not all system users are well informed, of course.

I'll keep posting my updates to the thread so other monitors can make their own decisions as to what seems to match actual real world conditions better.

Which changes were undone? I did notice TG11312 went from being listed as unencrypted to encrypted back to unencrypted. I can attest to the fact that it is unencrypted. I listen to that one and have never seen it show as encrypted. I can also attest to the fact that not a lot of the system users are well informed. There has a lot of confusion and miscommunication about stuff especially among Colonie users. Radios are being reprogrammed without any training and in some cases, little to no notice.

 

[DaveNF2G]

Please disregard my little temper tantrum is message #189. I was cranky this morning for reasons that have nothing to do with RadioReference and I spouted off here. I apologize to the members and DB Admins for stirring up any dissension.

 

[sallen07]

Where did it go?

OK I am in Albany this weekend, and I have a couple scanners I've used to listen to the Albany County P25 system before with me. Where did it go? They are both locking onto 859.2625 as the CC ... and that's the old Colonie system, judging by the fact that what very little traffic I am hearing is on TG 1953, which is the fire dispatch on that system.

Where is the CC for Albany?

 

[DaveNF2G]

Today it is on 856.1125.

 

[Thunderknight]

I see 859.2625 was put back in the RRDB for Albany County and the note about it overlapping with Colonie was removed. That may again present problems for some scanners as 859.2625 is the active CC for 1D6 (Colonie) and scanners don't know to skip it because the sysid is wrong.

 

[GTR8000]

I see 859.2625 was put back in the RRDB for Albany County and the note about it overlapping with Colonie was removed. That may again present problems for some scanners as 859.2625 is the active CC for 1D6 (Colonie) and scanners don't know to skip it because the sysid is wrong.

On December 11th, we received two submissions regarding the frequencies for the Albany and Colonie systems:

Corrections to 0695 Albany County

0695 Albany County

Frequencies
add 857.2125 858.4375 858.9375 859.2625a

Corrections to 01D6 Town of Colonie

Frequencies
delete 860.2625 859.2625

As it is against policy, I won't disclose the source of those two submissions, but he knows who he is. This is not the first time we've had issues with submissions this person has made, so from now on we'll be sure to more carefully scrutinize anything coming from that person. If need be, all submissions from this person will now be held until someone else in the area can verify their accuracy.

In the meanwhile, I've reverted the changes to the database so that 859.2625 is out of Albany and back in Colonie.

If someone can confirm the status of 860.2625, whether it belongs in Albany or Colonie, that would be appreciated.

 

[Thunderknight]

In the meanwhile, I've reverted the changes to the database so that 859.2625 is out of Albany and back in Colonie.

If someone can confirm the status of 860.2625, whether it belongs in Albany or Colonie, that would be appreciated.

I believe all the Colonie frequencies will eventually be migrated into the County system.

I'll watch both in pro96com and see if I can figure out where 860.2625 is active (if either). I just brought up Colonie and it's transmitting 860.2625 as an alternate with 859.2625 as the active CC. There is limited traffic left so it may take a bit to see if there is any voice traffic activity on it though.

Edit: That didn't take long due to a fire dispatch call...860.2625 is still active on the Colonie 1D6 system.

 

[GTR8000]

Thanks much, I'll fix that now.

It's comforting to know that we have reliable people in the area to correct bad submissions.

Can you please confirm what each system is broadcasting as primary and alternate control channels? Right now the Albany system only has 1+1 listed in the database.

Thanks!

 

[Thunderknight]

Thanks much, I'll fix that now.

It's comforting to know that we have reliable people in the area to correct bad submissions.

Can you please confirm what each system is broadcasting as primary and alternate control channels? Right now the Albany system only has 1+1 listed in the database.

Thanks!

I just renamed both the sysid folders in Pro96Com so I'd have all fresh info.

Colonie 1D6 is broadcasting:
859.2625 as control
858.2625 as alternate
860.2625 as alternate
traffic is light so I didn't wait for all the voice channels, but 860.2625 was the only channel with voice during the fire patch earlier so that is part of 1D6 still.

Albany (695, site 1) is broadcasting:
856.1125 as control
859.2625 as alternate
859.7125 as alternate
860.2625 as alternate

852.575 voice
853.3625 voice
855.7125 voice
856.2625 voice
857.2125 voice
858.4375 voice
858.9375 voice
859.4375 voice

 

[GTR8000]

Thanks.

What a mess having 859.2625 and 860.2625 provisioned on both systems simultaneously like that. I don't know what the ST's were thinking.

There's no easy answer for this as far as the database is concerned. If we leave the two frequencies as part of both systems, you run into the same issues that sallen07 did, where the scanner locks onto whatever is the active control channel with no regard for which system it is.

Since the two frequencies seem to still be primarily active on the Colonie system, that's where I'm leaving them. Hopefully they'll straighten this out sooner rather than later.

 

[sallen07]

Thanks GTR8000!

I think that it was actually a combination of two things. First was the fact that I re-downloaded the Albany County system on Thursday so I could pick up all the newly-added TGIDs. Unfortunately that also downloaded that frequency that is still being used by the Colonie system. I should have remembered that earlier since I had the same problem about a year ago the first time I tried to listen to the Albany system while here. But thanks for cleaning that up in the database.

The other issue I'm running into is location. I'm staying in the hotel that I usually stay at while here, but looks like I just cannot lock onto the system in this room. I get lots of signal, but neither scanner ever finds the control channel. I was able to get a little bit of traffic in a different location in the hotel.

Oh well. Got lots of other things programmed in that I can listen to this trip.