radio17
Member
After installing a better antenna on my Homepatrol my reception of the Bucks County Motorola trunk system really went downhill. Garbled broken up audio and the scan time increased sometimes pausing on Bucks for 5 or more seconds.
Why? The database has 5 sites for the Bucks trunked system. With small stock antenna the HP-1 could only receive the local site. The better antenna allowed the HP-1 to weakly receive the remote sites and so it attempted to sample the weak control channels, taking a very long time. If a transmission occured on the remote site of course it was weakly received.
The problem is compounded by the fact that 3 of the sites have the exact same frequencies in the database (Hatfield, Chalfont, Frenchtown). The HP-1 would scan the weak control channel 3 seperate times. The seperate entries for these 3 sites would have SOME value if they had correct location data in the DB, (to take advanatge of the HP-1's location-range feature), but they all have the same generic location somewhere in Bucks county.
Since my local site (North Simulcast) appears to carry all Bucks traffic, my solution is just to avoid all the others. I have a seperate favorites list while traveling which includes North and South Simulcast and one of the duplicated frequency sites.
Until these 3 duplicate frequency sites have correct location data in the DB, I can see no reason for anyone to include more then one of them in their scan. Since there are 4 frequencies listed for them I guess it would be possible for each one to use a different control channel but this is not reflected in the DB and the HP-1 only samples the control channel it sees first (or the strongest, not sure about that). Either way it's just doing the same thing 3 times in a row.
This only pertains to HP-1 users. I would hope that anyone entering these sites manually would realize that they are exact duplicate frequencies.
I am no way criticizing the DB administrators. I have searched the FCC DB for these sites and it is quite confusing to me. The Radio Reference DB is a great piece of work!!!
Why? The database has 5 sites for the Bucks trunked system. With small stock antenna the HP-1 could only receive the local site. The better antenna allowed the HP-1 to weakly receive the remote sites and so it attempted to sample the weak control channels, taking a very long time. If a transmission occured on the remote site of course it was weakly received.
The problem is compounded by the fact that 3 of the sites have the exact same frequencies in the database (Hatfield, Chalfont, Frenchtown). The HP-1 would scan the weak control channel 3 seperate times. The seperate entries for these 3 sites would have SOME value if they had correct location data in the DB, (to take advanatge of the HP-1's location-range feature), but they all have the same generic location somewhere in Bucks county.
Since my local site (North Simulcast) appears to carry all Bucks traffic, my solution is just to avoid all the others. I have a seperate favorites list while traveling which includes North and South Simulcast and one of the duplicated frequency sites.
Until these 3 duplicate frequency sites have correct location data in the DB, I can see no reason for anyone to include more then one of them in their scan. Since there are 4 frequencies listed for them I guess it would be possible for each one to use a different control channel but this is not reflected in the DB and the HP-1 only samples the control channel it sees first (or the strongest, not sure about that). Either way it's just doing the same thing 3 times in a row.
This only pertains to HP-1 users. I would hope that anyone entering these sites manually would realize that they are exact duplicate frequencies.
I am no way criticizing the DB administrators. I have searched the FCC DB for these sites and it is quite confusing to me. The Radio Reference DB is a great piece of work!!!
