Something is up. I use to pick APD/AFD fine in the upper end of Guilderland now I have to wait till I crest the hill past the 20 Mall. The audio seems lower too once I do finally get it. I noticed one of the feed providers must be having difficulty too because nothing is coming over his feed and its on
When Albany rebanded their trunking system, they changed a few things around. First they went from 20K0F3E modulation, which was wide-bandwidth analog voice, to 16K0F3E, which is the same thing, but more narrowbanded. However, they did add 16K0F9W, which has been used on a lot of Project 25 trunking radio system for digital voice and data. This leads me to believe that they might be making some significant changes.
I know that several trunking systems have been using two sets of antennas for rebanding on their radio towers. Likewise, this has been done when several agencies went from analog to digital. Case in point, one of the counties in Florida has three radio towers that are 152 meters tall, with the antennas mounted at 145 meters above ground level. During the changeover from analog to Project 25, they moved the analog transmitters over to the several temporary antennas that were mounted at a height of less than 90 meters up the tower from the bottom. Likewise, their was a gain factor decrease, which ultimately dropped the ERP down so it would be safe for the technicians to climb the towers, and make the necessary infrastructure modifications and upgrades. Finally, when the new P25 system went online, they were using the new antennas up at 145 meters above the ground at full power. The only difference is you now need a digital scanner to decode their radio traffic.
It will be interesting to see how this all plans out in the next few months. I would occasionally search their licensed frequencies for any "new" data channels that might pop up out of the blue.
73s
Ron