Living in northern cook county where there is plenty of EMF preventing monitoring of high UHF DMR/NXDN/MotoTRBO on my SDS100. Looking for others who may have found a radio best suitable for this.
Best scanner for High UHF DMR/NXDN/MotoTRBO in Northern Cook County
- Thread starter kbk777
- Start date
AC9BX
Member
If interference is bad a different radio will not offer much help. A more sensitive radio (Whistler for example) will be worse. It's not a matter of the radio but a matter of reducing interference. A higher end general coverage receiver may help. You're looking at something much more expensive like an ICOM 6800 for example. Filtering the antenna system can help. Notch trouble frequencies, filter mobile phone networks, etc. But if it's radio hash coming from electrical equipment you have work to do. Since the worst will be near you, start looking at home first. Noisy power supplies are EVERYWHERE in the modern home.
By high UHF, are you referring to the UHF T-Band (470 to 512 MHz)? I'm in the North Shore area, and I never had a problem receiving anything in that band while using my SDS100. I agree with the above post that there's many factors that may contribute to your issue. Also, agencies in many cities, including Chicago, have reported issues with the UHF T-Band ever since DTV channels started changing frequencies. That's why the Chicago Fire Department is currently using the city's 800MHz P25 system, and eventually will switch over to 460MHz due to issues with their T-Band freqs.
Just figured I'd see if anyone had anything new on this topic?
Whoops...sorry to leave ya hanging. I totally forgot about this thread. To answer your previous question, as far as UHF-T DMR systems go, I mainly monitor the TRBOconnection-TRBOnexus system. Other than that, I like to monitor the area Hospitals. Since a lot of them use DMR, I have them programmed as DMR OFT (One Frequency Trunk) systems. However, they mainly use the 460-464 MHz range, not the T-Band.
What hospital systems are you monitoring and how do you have them set up in SDS100?
ChicagoRadio736
Member
436hp for UHF/VHF and SDS100 for 700/800 in my opinion.
Half agree with the first part. If it's analog, then the x36HP scanners are better. If it's digital VHF/UHF, then the SDS scanners still worked better imo. I 100% agree however that on 700/800 MHz, the SDS's are hard to beat.
What antenna are you using? Did you try using the different filters?
I have tried remtronix and a number of others for UHF/UHF-T. I even tried an external as well as mag mount on my car. I can sit in the hospital parking lot and still not hear anything. All filter combinations have been tried to no avail. Also note that this is my third SDS100 as they all behave the same way. I’m stumped.
ka3jjz
Wiki Admin Emeritus
The best way to help you, assuming here that you aren't out of range for the systems you want to hear, is to zip up your programming file and let others see how you set things up. Some DMR and NXDN systems are low power and only designed to cover a small area. There are several tricks to programming DMR, MOTOTRBO and NXDN systems that, to be honest, aren't clearly documented anywhere (our wiki has several things but it's very far from complete). For example some NXDN systems need the Logical channel number to be correct to hear anything. Let others see your programming, and people can start from there
That's a great idea! I would really appreciate any help! I exported the system to HPE file format, zipped it and attached it here. Please let me know. Thanks!
ChicagoRadio736
Member
When I'm scanning around Ohare and Rosemont areas my 436/536 is performing better on UHF/VHF than my SDS100/200 on DMR from the more distant stations. Local stations are about the same. Same antenna configurations.
Do you have service types 'Security' and 'Business' selected/enabled from the main menu? Maybe use 'ID Search' instead of 'ID Scan'?
It has been nearly five and a half years since I confirmed this system and added it to the database, and I haven't listened to it since. There's always the possibility that things could have changed in that time.
Please advise if you have any luck hearing traffic on that or any other site in this system.
I tried everything, including different search options, service types, filters, you name it. The scanner stops at a DMR frequency but does not receive. The very odd thing is it something does receive, but that is very sporadic. I have also tried the TRX-1 and it was a total nightmare to program and also failed to receive anything. Back to the drawing board LOL!
