Good luck on that. This is a sparsely populated area to begin with. I haven't seen many RR members around here. You might have to make a road trip.
Texas is a long way from Ohio. And a half dozen guys (4 doing one or more road trips) already figured out all of Ohio. I'm not suggesting that you step up. I'm just asking somebody in these areas to step up. Sparsely populated or not (southern Ohio is rural as hell), I know there are people with DSDPlus or at least capabilities of detecting P25 and getting site details with a scanner throughout the AEP service area. After all, the database is full of EDACS site information (a lot of it wrong) for the AEP systems all over. Somebody supposedly monitored those sites to get the details.
The goal here is to get people active and to actually use proper tools to get all avaialble information, and thus not only get new sites discovered and added as soon as possible, but have them correct in the DB the first time around rather than having the system turn into what the old EDACS mashup was.
Unfortunately, except for spamming the forum of every state AEP touches (and then hoping somebody in that state reads the thread), there really is no way to "rally" anyone to start checking. One just has to hope that people read this thread.
To add insult to injury, this thread is has American Electric Power in the subject, and I'm sure a lot of people are in Kentucky Power, Appalachian Power, Indiana-Michigan Power, Public Service Company of OK, and SWEPCO territories and don't think twice when they see a thread with the subject of "American Electric Power" -- not realizing they are part of the AEP service territory.
I'm outside of the AEP service area. The only two sites I can receive all the time are Oklaunion, TX and Comanche, OK.
They are still EDACS as of right now.
In Ohio when they turned up a P25 site they had both the P25 and EDACS for that site running for quite a period of time. So, just confirming EDACS is online doesn't necessarily mean that P25 isn't online. It probably isn't on the sites your listening to, but for the rest of the readers out there they shouldn't assume that live EDACS means no P25. They absolutely can and often do have both running simultaneously at the same site, or at least did up here in Ohio. (and radio techs seem to call that "hybrid mode")
Often during band openings I can recive 700/800/900 MHz control channels out to 200 miles or more. Last time that happened was was a couple weeks ago. AEP was still all EDACS then. If they started converting to P25 in TX maybe the started in far south TX first. It's very rare for me to be able to pick up anything in the AEP south TX service area.
Rgr that. I just want to keep readers of this thread (if there are any lol) abreast of what they should be looking out for. And Rgr on tropo. Most of the WVSIRN and First Energy sites (P25 systems in WV) were discovered by people in Ohio during tropo. Gotta love it!
Mike
