Hello all. New to scanning, hope I don't come off as a complete dolt by misusing terminology; please excuse and correct me if I get something wrong trying to explain and ask here.
OK.. The last week or so, I have been listening to the Arlington Police department at 859.71250 using a Pro-97. I was a little surprised, because I thought I had learned somewhere that the APD had switched to digital trunking that I would not be able to track. That said, I thought that not understanding how to setup the trunk-tracking would just mean that I'd miss pieces of of conversations, except for the fact that I also thought APD was on a *digital* trunked system, which even my "triple-trunking" scanner wasn't going to be able to track. So should I hear nothing? Should I hear only partial conversations? Either way, I was pleasantly surprised with what I was hearing. However, I was also a little confused, as as far as I understood, I hadn't done what I was supposed to do to set the scanner in trunk tracking mode. About the second day into it I pushed the "mode" key enough (let me interrupt here to say that my question is not scanner specific, please bear with me) that instead of just FM, I now had a "CT" on my display, and read and fumbled about enough to realize that I had it set in Code Search mode, where it was just hearing and learning the codes on its own. It was kinda neat to see the various codes scroll by but I didn't really see the purpose of this, as I was hearing everything seemingly just fine. (It hadn't dawned on me that I might want to discriminate to only certain codes/trunks/talkgroup ids/etc since being a newbie, my ears were still greed.) I digress..
Now, yesterday, I finally read marksscanners' "Easier to Read Pro-97/2055 Scanner Manual" and figured out how to enable the trunk banks and save tgids and edit text tags, etc.. So now, I could hit "mode" a few more times and instead of just Am/FM or CT, I had "MOT:" (for Motorola) to cycle through while listening to this frequency and while, in my greedy listening habit, I had the scanner in "open mode", I'd see all TGID's, as communications came in and my newly added text tags would now display "DISPATCH" and "SOUTH TALK", etc adding a descriptive caption to the talker. (Though, at times that seemed like the tags were accurate, yesterday, it certainly seemed as if the same talkers were just hopping TGID's with each new transmission. But still, this isn't the point of this wordy post, which I will get to now.)
So, as I mentioned, I was impressed and confused by this whole thing as though it was interesting to see the TGID's scroll by, I didn't think that it was supposed to work like this, and in a sort of hunch, I successfully listened to 859.71250 using some other receivers, not billed as trunking scanners (an ICOM IC-R3 and an Alinco DJ-X3, though these are Japanese imports, even as a newbie I knew that their "unblockedness" couldn't explain how they were picking up every piece of every conversation on this Motorola trunked system.) That said, for tonight I was content to remain impressed and confused and not really spend any brainpower trying to figure out what I didn't know/misunderstood, I was just going to listen for a bit. All day Friday, and until after midnight this very A.M. all was working as described above. Until about one hour ago, I was replacing batteries and charging rechargables and turned on the Pro-97 with fresh batteries to be surprised and confused once more, this time by loud scary noise, which I (possibly incorrectly) associate with that of a non-digital-trunking scanner being tuned to a digital-trunked frequency.
I turn on the other two aforementioned scanners and they, too, pick up the digital noise. But why? what? I'm watching my entered text scroll by as TGID's change so I see the traffic, just as I labeled it, chattering away, but all I hear is noise. Then... what's this? a new text tag that I didn't enter! Right there next to the "MOT:" where unlabeled TGIDs flash as does my custom text , is a new string: "Sys-162A", and another: "Control", followed by a percentage, from 0 to 99% varying. Now, this actually jives a little more with what I thought I knew about both digital trunking in general (the "Control" channel label) and Arlington PD's system specifically (the "Sys-162A" label")
A quick google leads me to the page where I initially got Arlington's frequency and then later the text tags I added to the TGID's as the scanner learned them. "162A" is the sysid of the Motorola Type II Smartnet system APD uses on the frequency I'm scanning; a fact I learned from a page on a radioreference.com wiki at http://www.radioreference.com/modules.php?name=RR&sid=1
What gives? My first thought was that the storm broke something but further thinking brought me to think perhaps something had broken prior and that it was just luck that I found them using their old system (or the new system in some degraded performance mode, or some similar explanation) and that the storm is a red herring and my whole story is driven by dumb luck and timing.
Anyone care to respond? ;-)
Thanks for reading!
ScottVR
OK.. The last week or so, I have been listening to the Arlington Police department at 859.71250 using a Pro-97. I was a little surprised, because I thought I had learned somewhere that the APD had switched to digital trunking that I would not be able to track. That said, I thought that not understanding how to setup the trunk-tracking would just mean that I'd miss pieces of of conversations, except for the fact that I also thought APD was on a *digital* trunked system, which even my "triple-trunking" scanner wasn't going to be able to track. So should I hear nothing? Should I hear only partial conversations? Either way, I was pleasantly surprised with what I was hearing. However, I was also a little confused, as as far as I understood, I hadn't done what I was supposed to do to set the scanner in trunk tracking mode. About the second day into it I pushed the "mode" key enough (let me interrupt here to say that my question is not scanner specific, please bear with me) that instead of just FM, I now had a "CT" on my display, and read and fumbled about enough to realize that I had it set in Code Search mode, where it was just hearing and learning the codes on its own. It was kinda neat to see the various codes scroll by but I didn't really see the purpose of this, as I was hearing everything seemingly just fine. (It hadn't dawned on me that I might want to discriminate to only certain codes/trunks/talkgroup ids/etc since being a newbie, my ears were still greed.) I digress..
Now, yesterday, I finally read marksscanners' "Easier to Read Pro-97/2055 Scanner Manual" and figured out how to enable the trunk banks and save tgids and edit text tags, etc.. So now, I could hit "mode" a few more times and instead of just Am/FM or CT, I had "MOT:" (for Motorola) to cycle through while listening to this frequency and while, in my greedy listening habit, I had the scanner in "open mode", I'd see all TGID's, as communications came in and my newly added text tags would now display "DISPATCH" and "SOUTH TALK", etc adding a descriptive caption to the talker. (Though, at times that seemed like the tags were accurate, yesterday, it certainly seemed as if the same talkers were just hopping TGID's with each new transmission. But still, this isn't the point of this wordy post, which I will get to now.)
So, as I mentioned, I was impressed and confused by this whole thing as though it was interesting to see the TGID's scroll by, I didn't think that it was supposed to work like this, and in a sort of hunch, I successfully listened to 859.71250 using some other receivers, not billed as trunking scanners (an ICOM IC-R3 and an Alinco DJ-X3, though these are Japanese imports, even as a newbie I knew that their "unblockedness" couldn't explain how they were picking up every piece of every conversation on this Motorola trunked system.) That said, for tonight I was content to remain impressed and confused and not really spend any brainpower trying to figure out what I didn't know/misunderstood, I was just going to listen for a bit. All day Friday, and until after midnight this very A.M. all was working as described above. Until about one hour ago, I was replacing batteries and charging rechargables and turned on the Pro-97 with fresh batteries to be surprised and confused once more, this time by loud scary noise, which I (possibly incorrectly) associate with that of a non-digital-trunking scanner being tuned to a digital-trunked frequency.
I turn on the other two aforementioned scanners and they, too, pick up the digital noise. But why? what? I'm watching my entered text scroll by as TGID's change so I see the traffic, just as I labeled it, chattering away, but all I hear is noise. Then... what's this? a new text tag that I didn't enter! Right there next to the "MOT:" where unlabeled TGIDs flash as does my custom text , is a new string: "Sys-162A", and another: "Control", followed by a percentage, from 0 to 99% varying. Now, this actually jives a little more with what I thought I knew about both digital trunking in general (the "Control" channel label) and Arlington PD's system specifically (the "Sys-162A" label")
A quick google leads me to the page where I initially got Arlington's frequency and then later the text tags I added to the TGID's as the scanner learned them. "162A" is the sysid of the Motorola Type II Smartnet system APD uses on the frequency I'm scanning; a fact I learned from a page on a radioreference.com wiki at http://www.radioreference.com/modules.php?name=RR&sid=1
What gives? My first thought was that the storm broke something but further thinking brought me to think perhaps something had broken prior and that it was just luck that I found them using their old system (or the new system in some degraded performance mode, or some similar explanation) and that the storm is a red herring and my whole story is driven by dumb luck and timing.
Anyone care to respond? ;-)
Thanks for reading!
ScottVR
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