Can I Remove All Sites Except the Simulcast One From FL?

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Joe_Blough

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Noobie Disclaimer. My first and only scanner was a Regency M400 I bought back in the 1980s. Stumbled across SDR a few months ago and it rekindled my interest in scanning.

I am going to get a Uniden SDS200 in a few months so have been watching You Tube videos, reading and searching these forums, reading the Easier to Read Sentinel 436/536HP manual, and working with the Sentinel program to learn it and get my favorites lists and profile set up before I get the SDS200.

My county uses a P25 system for Police, Fire, School Security, Animal Control, EMS, buses, etc. I have created a Favorites List for this system and appended to my favorites list the departments I am interested in such as Police and Fire for the city, county, and a couple neighboring cities.

This system has 15 sites each with a different set of between 4 and 12 frequencies. I assume each site is associated with the communication for a particular area and/or department and that Sentinel appends all the sites into your favorites list so no matter what departments you have in your FL the scanner will have the correct frequencies.

However, one of these sites is labeled as Simulcast and has 20 frequencies in it. So, in the interest of saving time scanning a bunch of different sites and frequencies which may be for departments or areas I don't have in my FL, could I remove all these other sites and leave just the Simulcast site in my FL and be good to go? I have listened to this Simulcast site using a USB dongle and Unitrunker and it comes in strong with health of 100.
 

phask

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WheterSimulcast or not it all depends on the location. A simulcast site is treated the same as a single site, it's just multiple sites, timed perfectly all transmitting the same (more or less).

You need whatever sites that cover the location you want, also sometimes departments may be restricted to just certain sites.

Link to the site and your location for more help.
 

marksmith

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Sort of depends on your situation, but in general, yes, you can load the whole system from the database in Sentinel, then delete all the sites except the closest.

You do it in a favorites list as opposed to the database.

You may find, however, that you can receive more than one site from your location, and there may be certain services or operations that only happen on that second site.

It's generally never efficient to scan all sites because newer systems re-use frequencies etc and it can confuse in terms of what you are really hearing.

Mark
SDS100&200/536/436/WS1095/996p2/996xt/325p2/396xt/psr800/396t/HP-1/HP-2 & others
 

ofd8001

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Along with the above comments, it is hard to answer this question without knowing which system you are monitoring and where you monitor it from.

My local area (Louisville KY) is a good example. There is a simulcast system to cover the Louisville/Jefferson County area. There are additional subsystems for adjacent counties. If you live in Louisville and listen to Louisville, then just Louisville site is fine. But if you are in the next county over, you won't hear what you desire.
 

Eng74

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Are you using the scanner as a base or mobile unit? If it is just going to be sitting on your desk you can just use the closest site, delete the others, avoid them, or turn them off depending how you want to set the radio up
 

Joe_Blough

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Thank you all for the replies. Great info. I am using the scanner as a base and won't be changing locations. It makes sense not to enter systems outside the range I can receive them.

WheterSimulcast or not it all depends on the location. A simulcast site is treated the same as a single site, it's just multiple sites, timed perfectly all transmitting the same (more or less).

You may find, however, that you can receive more than one site from your location, and there may be certain services or operations that only happen on that second site.

Are you using the scanner as a base or mobile unit? If it is just going to be sitting on your desk you can just use the closest site, delete the others, avoid them, or turn them off depending how you want to set the radio up

So based on the replies above, does the simulcast broadcast all the communications going on at all the other sites, including those out of range from my location? Isn't that the purpose?
 

marksmith

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The answer is no. Not all sites on a simulcast system broadcast the same stuff.

Some users, that range over the whole system by the nature of their service might be carried on many sites, but lots of activity that only operates in one corner of the system is often only active on a single site. There is no purpose to repeating it outside it's normal operating area.

This is why I said if you receive 2 sites where you are, you might want to have both scanning. Some users will likely be on both sites since they are likely adjacent sites, but you might also hear traffic that is only on one of those sites, and you would miss it if you only monitor one.

This is absolutely true on large multi site systems that cover a lot of territory. Users often only utilize their most local site. Hardly any users will be carried across all sites.

Moral: Don't expect to hear rhe entire system by monitoring one site.

Mark
SDS100&200/536/436/WS1095/996p2/996xt/325p2/396xt/psr800/396t/HP-1/HP-2 & others
 

ofd8001

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What is carried on sites depends on how the system administrators configure the system. Wide area systems can have sites linked together. Most of the time linking talkgroups over wide areas are those relating to mutual aid purposes.

For example, our MetroSafe System (http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?sid=4303) the "main" system covering Louisville/Jefferson County is a 13 site simulcast system. In the three adjacent counties (Bullitt, Shelby and Oldham) there are remote sites if we have to venture into these areas.

The suburban fire departments have 4 operations talkgroups, Fire 5, Fire 6, Fire 7 and Fire 8. All four of these talkgroups are carried on the Jefferson County simulcast sites. However, only Fire 6, Fire 7 and Fire 8 are allowed to "affiliate" on the Bullitt, Shelby and Oldham sites. Fire 5 is the primary operations channel. Fire 6, 7 and 8 are assigned when Fire 5 is busy or there is a major incident (working structure fire).

The administrators, for better or worse, elected to not allow Fire 5 on these adjacent sites. Their thinking, for better or worse, was that allowing the primary operations channel on the remote sites would tie up these sites for when they were "really" needed. So if we end up going into these adjacent counties for mutual aid purposes, the dispatchers have to assign us to Fire 6, 7 or 8.
 
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