American Electric Power (AEP) P25 WACN 92715

[iceman977th]

Anyone happen to know what areas are transitioned to P25P2 yet? I've been playing with my ingest, which is decoding MARCS fine, have the current active control channels plugged in, but none of em show decoding control in SDRTrunk. I see the occasional blip for data and that's it. I've programmed the active CC's in as both P25P1 and P25P2 and nothing even with adequate signal at the house (and by adequate I'm saying -24 and above on one CC)

Mike

 

[n8jsw]

As far as I know all of AEP in Ohio is P2 and if you’re talking tdma I don’t think any site in Ohio yet has switched

 

[mtindor]

Anyone happen to know what areas are transitioned to P25P2 yet? I've been playing with my ingest, which is decoding MARCS fine, have the current active control channels plugged in, but none of em show decoding control in SDRTrunk. I see the occasional blip for data and that's it. I've programmed the active CC's in as both P25P1 and P25P2 and nothing even with adequate signal at the house (and by adequate I'm saying -24 and above on one CC)

Mike

If you are in OH or WV and none of the control channels will decode, make sure you are using C4FM and specify Phase I CC. If you sill can't get any to decode, try switching to Phase II CC in SDRTrunk for them and see what happens. In Kentucky I can't really say because it's been a while since we've monitored the KY sites via tropo. When they were last monitored by us East Ohio Crew, they were all FDMA control channels.

Some of the KY sites haven't been verified online -- See the AEP wiki. And if you do look in the wiki, the control channel listed was the one that was active on the site at teh time it was monitored -- and it may have changed.

Can you be more specific regarding each AEP site you are programming in to SDRTrunk?

Mike

 

[iceman977th]

If you are in OH or WV and none of the control channels will decode, make sure you are using C4FM and specify Phase I CC. If you sill can't get any to decode, try switching to Phase II CC in SDRTrunk for them and see what happens. In Kentucky I can't really say because it's been a while since we've monitored the KY sites via tropo. When they were last monitored by us East Ohio Crew, they were all FDMA control channels.

Some of the KY sites haven't been verified online -- See the AEP wiki. And if you do look in the wiki, the control channel listed was the one that was active on the site at teh time it was monitored -- and it may have changed.

Can you be more specific regarding each AEP site you are programming in to SDRTrunk?

Mike

Found my issue. SDRTrunk Nightly is not playing well with P25 decoding at all. I switched back to final, and manually set a single frequency for each CC, no issues staying locked now. Getting steady CC lock on Catlettsburg KY and Greenup KY now.

Hopefully this will get fixed on the nightly build soon so I can get my Calls ingest going. Right now I can only use one or the other, and my county has both conventional analog and conventional P25 so I either have to run two instances or deal with either poor analog squelch or bad P25 decoding.

 

[mtindor]

Found my issue. SDRTrunk Nightly is not playing well with P25 decoding at all. I switched back to final, and manually set a single frequency for each CC, no issues staying locked now. Getting steady CC lock on Catlettsburg KY and Greenup KY now.

Hopefully this will get fixed on the nightly build soon so I can get my Calls ingest going. Right now I can only use one or the other, and my county has both conventional analog and conventional P25 so I either have to run two instances or deal with either poor analog squelch or bad P25 decoding.

When you get a chance can you fetch the list of neighbors for those sites from SDRTrunk and post them, in case there are any updates.

Thanks

Mike

 

[iceman977th]

Sure.

Greenup KY



Catlettsburg (Boyd KY)


Ironton (which if I remember right is actually in Kitts Hill)

Those are the only three I'm actively receiving at the moment. South Point fades on me (I believe that's the one out near the college, so about 12 miles from me) I have a Lana coming and probably should look at some RF filters at some point. Lana is a temporary configuration until I can get a proper multicoupler in a few weeks.

 

[mtindor]

Sure.

Greenup KY

View attachment 188926

Catlettsburg (Boyd KY)
View attachment 188925

Ironton (which if I remember right is actually in Kitts Hill)
View attachment 188927
Those are the only three I'm actively receiving at the moment. South Point fades on me (I believe that's the one out near the college, so about 12 miles from me) I have a Lana coming and probably should look at some RF filters at some point. Lana is a temporary configuration until I can get a proper multicoupler in a few weeks.

Thank you!

 

[mtindor]

@iceman977th ,

Did you say you were going to be setting up a Broadcastify Calls feed for those three sites on American Electric Power P25 ? If so, that would be great. The more the merrier! I run the Steubenviile one, and I know there is one other online BCFY Calls feed.

If you do, you'd want to do three separate calls nodes, one fer each.

Mike

 

[iceman977th]

@iceman977th ,

Did you say you were going to be setting up a Broadcastify Calls feed for those three sites on American Electric Power P25 ? If so, that would be great. The more the merrier! I run the Steubenviile one, and I know there is one other online BCFY Calls feed.

If you do, you'd want to do three separate calls nodes, one fer each.

Mike

I'm working on ironing out the kinks on a large Calls ingest for the area. But yes, I am hoping to do so. I'm hoping to have one at the house, potentially moved to our club's tower site, and I have access to another site about 30 minutes west of here that would overlap that might become one as well.

 

[mtindor]

Another new Louisiana license, which makes 10 this year. All 10 of the new LA sites are south of Ringgold. This one is not approved yet

Fort Polk, LA (Vernon) - ULS Application - Business/Industrial/Land Trans, 809-824/854-869 MHz, Trunked - 0011763545 - American Electric Power Service Corporation - Locations Summary
LeBleu Rd
31.03058,-93.24727

854.2625
856.5125
857.1625
859.7875
861.1375

Google Map

 

[iceman977th]

Finally getting around to setting my main ingest up and added a few towers today. Looks like there's 3 talkgroups that I've seen in the Ashland KY area so far.

3200 - Sounds like Kentucky DDC, have received traffic on this TG but haven't heard any addresses yet to correlate a location/area
2266 - Looks like an Ohio talkgroup, no traffic to Rdio yet
4206 - I assume a WV talkgroup, no traffic to Rdio yet

Once I have some more details on these I'll submit them to the DB and get things sending to Calls. Also seems like I've seen traffic on the Ironton and South Point towers, have not seen any traffic on Catlettsburg or Greenup yet even though I'm fully locked on. West Portsmouth is iffy right now and I haven't tried punching in any more WV sites or additional KY sites yet.

 

[mtindor]

Finally getting around to setting my main ingest up and added a few towers today. Looks like there's 3 talkgroups that I've seen in the Ashland KY area so far.

3200 - Sounds like Kentucky DDC, have received traffic on this TG but haven't heard any addresses yet to correlate a location/area
2266 - Looks like an Ohio talkgroup, no traffic to Rdio yet
4206 - I assume a WV talkgroup, no traffic to Rdio yet

Once I have some more details on these I'll submit them to the DB and get things sending to Calls. Also seems like I've seen traffic on the Ironton and South Point towers, have not seen any traffic on Catlettsburg or Greenup yet even though I'm fully locked on. West Portsmouth is iffy right now and I haven't tried punching in any more WV sites or additional KY sites yet.

Sounds great. I'm looking forward to hearing the new nodes online.

If I may make some suggestions:

1. When you set up the Calls feed for each AEP node, set the Down notification time to 8 hours or more

If you don't, you'll get driven crazy by the false Up/Down notifications that you will get when there are 3-4 or even 8 hours since a last transmission. Unlike a standard feed, a Calls Feed is "offline" when it isn't sending any audio for a period of time. And on these AEP sites the audio is often scarce. I set mine to 8 hours, and I get notified EVERY night that it is down, and then back up in the morning. I could have set it to 12 or 24 hours, but I don't want to be aware if is actually down. So I set to 8 hours of no audio, then it's down.

2. SDRTrunk will display radio aliases

OH#### for Ohio
APO#### for Appalachian Power

Unfortunately, every one I have ever seen is generic, making it impossible to identify anything other than which part of the AEP system they are from. Forget about using the OTA aliases to determine general location or type of activity.

3. You'll notice that the feed isn't always visible in the Node list, depending upon how recently actual audio has been sent to that node.

Mike

 

[iceman977th]

Sounds great. I'm looking forward to hearing the new nodes online.

If I may make some suggestions:

1. When you set up the Calls feed for each AEP node, set the Down notification time to 8 hours or more

If you don't, you'll get driven crazy by the false Up/Down notifications that you will get when there are 3-4 or even 8 hours since a last transmission. Unlike a standard feed, a Calls Feed is "offline" when it isn't sending any audio for a period of time. And on these AEP sites the audio is often scarce. I set mine to 8 hours, and I get notified EVERY night that it is down, and then back up in the morning. I could have set it to 12 or 24 hours, but I don't want to be aware if is actually down. So I set to 8 hours of no audio, then it's down.

2. SDRTrunk will display radio aliases

OH#### for Ohio
APO#### for Appalachian Power

Unfortunately, every one I have ever seen is generic, making it impossible to identify anything other than which part of the AEP system they are from. Forget about using the OTA aliases to determine general location or type of activity.

3. You'll notice that the feed isn't always visible in the Node list, depending upon how recently actual audio has been sent to that node.

Mike

I did notice that they had TA's too. 3200 looked like Appy Power TA's so maybe it's not Kentucky DDC then, possibly Huntington? Only saw 3200 on Ironton and South Point I'm not sure where they're all located, but 2266 was OH TA's. I'll keep an eye out later today, I'm sure they will get chatty here in a couple hours.

Sounds great. I'm looking forward to hearing the new nodes online.

If I may make some suggestions:

1. When you set up the Calls feed for each AEP node, set the Down notification time to 8 hours or more

If you don't, you'll get driven crazy by the false Up/Down notifications that you will get when there are 3-4 or even 8 hours since a last transmission. Unlike a standard feed, a Calls Feed is "offline" when it isn't sending any audio for a period of time. And on these AEP sites the audio is often scarce. I set mine to 8 hours, and I get notified EVERY night that it is down, and then back up in the morning. I could have set it to 12 or 24 hours, but I don't want to be aware if is actually down. So I set to 8 hours of no audio, then it's down.

2. SDRTrunk will display radio aliases

OH#### for Ohio
APO#### for Appalachian Power

Unfortunately, every one I have ever seen is generic, making it impossible to identify anything other than which part of the AEP system they are from. Forget about using the OTA aliases to determine general location or type of activity.

3. You'll notice that the feed isn't always visible in the Node list, depending upon how recently actual audio has been sent to that node.

Mike

Appreciate the advice. It's funny though, I've yet to see voice on most of the sites that I would think I'd see them on like Catlettsburg and Greenup, unless those are data only for some reason. I did see some more TG's come up through today though.. 2259, 2256, 2705, and 4204. Need to add them in and archive on Rdio and see what they're for.

 

[mtindor]

I did notice that they had TA's too. 3200 looked like Appy Power TA's so maybe it's not Kentucky DDC then, possibly Huntington? Only saw 3200 on Ironton and South Point I'm not sure where they're all located, but 2266 was OH TA's. I'll keep an eye out later today, I'm sure they will get chatty here in a couple hours.

Appreciate the advice. It's funny though, I've yet to see voice on most of the sites that I would think I'd see them on like Catlettsburg and Greenup, unless those are data only for some reason. I did see some more TG's come up through today though.. 2259, 2256, 2705, and 4204. Need to add them in and archive on Rdio and see what they're for.

Yes, there are a number of sites around me, and most of them are silent unless there was inclement weather and linemen running all around the county trying to get things fixed. And they have LTE apps they can use as well to talk on the system, so they won't necessarily show up on a local tower even if they were near it, if they were using their LTE app for comms.

It's really difficult to actually pin down a lot of the TGs unless there is significant traffic on them. They mention locations a lot less and pole numbers and ticket numbers a lot more.

When there is inclement weather and activity on a site, you should pull up the Outage map for that system. That way if you hear one of them reference a trouble ticket you can look it up on the outage map and know a general location where they are working. Some service centers really cover a fairly large area and some cover smaller area. Our service center in Carrollton OH is the smallest of their service centers where they have trucks.

Mike

 

[iceman977th]

Yes, there are a number of sites around me, and most of them are silent unless there was inclement weather and linemen running all around the county trying to get things fixed. And they have LTE apps they can use as well to talk on the system, so they won't necessarily show up on a local tower even if they were near it, if they were using their LTE app for comms.

It's really difficult to actually pin down a lot of the TGs unless there is significant traffic on them. They mention locations a lot less and pole numbers and ticket numbers a lot more.

When there is inclement weather and activity on a site, you should pull up the Outage map for that system. That way if you hear one of them reference a trouble ticket you can look it up on the outage map and know a general location where they are working. Some service centers really cover a fairly large area and some cover smaller area. Our service center in Carrollton OH is the smallest of their service centers where they have trucks.

Mike

I sent in a submission for the three I've heard the most traffic on.. sounds like Jackson OH area Trouble (2266) What I assume to be Huntington/Barboursville area DDC (4206) and Ashland KY DDC (3200).. 3200 is the most chatty but appears to cover Boyd, Carter, and Lawrence at least judging off radio traffic. I've picked up a couple rogue transmissions on 3201 and 3202 but not enough to be conclusive on what they are.