Celina has like four talkgroups on Collin. Three for fire. It's a tossup whether McKinney would join in but I could see Frisco doing it. That whole side of the county is close to exploding like Melissa. You know Melissa has a BK at 121 and 545 now?
You could be right, but until somebody decides to do something, its anybodys guess. I kinda hope Frisco holds out another couple of years so I can continue to use my BCT996T (the non-Phase 2 one) as a dedicated monitoring radio, at least until I move out of Frisco (I used to work from home, and then took a job in Coppell in 2016, and prior to the pandemic was considering moving closer to the office). As far as the area exploding, Frisco and Prosper both have been for the 9 years I've lived here. Even the fabled Brinkman (Box) Ranch is starting to be carved up for development, and they're finally starting to build the DNT extension North of 380.
Buddy of mine is a PCT-1 Constable, he was saying the LE side is supposed to be ... oh what's that E word we aren't supposed to use, my memory is short but strange things are happening as Greenville PD is using less and less of it so who knows. I am getting 3 bars off Blue Ridge so it will be fun to watch this grow.
I hope the 'E' word doesn't proliferate too deep across the system. It was bad when I was listening to a police chase recently on 380 and Frisco called off as they entered McKinney, of course I didn't hear if McKinney PD picked it up because they don't have any clear channels not even dispatch. Since the new system started coming online, I decided to dial up the PAWM Site 1 on my SDS200, which of course other than dispatch is pretty much locked down. I was surprised today when I actually heard a couple of officers calling in on the Plano NCIC channel, in the clear with no 'E' flag on the Phase 2 channel (albeit with some distortion, they were understandable, so they may of been having radio problems). Of course I didn't hear the response because the dispatcher was still sending the 'E' flag. The interesting thing I noted is that even with the dispatcher though, the 'E' flag was not in the initial setup on most transmissions, meaning my scanner would stop on the channel for up to second before it would decide to move on because the flag was late (and as I am typing this one of the Plano Talkaround channels lit up and I could hear the "garbled" audio, but there was no flag on that call either, so that continued until the radio in question stopped transmitting and the next person keyed up, and the scanner moved on). I think I need to set up SDRTrunk to watch the PAWM site for a few hours and can log what's happening.
Getting 3 bars at Blue Ridge isn't bad, since the nearest simulcast site is off of County Road 502 near County Road 573. I'm lucky I'm equal distance from two of the simulcast sites, the one on the water tower at Virginia and Custer and the one at Frisco PD on Parkwood near Stonebrook Pkwy, so I get 5 bars, even on a handheld indoors. I will just be glad to hear clean audio instead of the static filled audio on the current Motorola system (fire tone outs are painful because of the distortion over the tones, and having to run the volume at a higher than normal level to hear the voice comms). Based on the dispatchers and others reports, it appears the problem is apparent to them as well, because I've heard many asks for them to repeat their last transmission.
I guess its all a wait and see. I'm going to keep the SDRTrunk logger and recorder up on it during the day as they continue testing. I hope to get some call outs of the assignments by the techs, so even if they turn on the 'E' later, we'll have the talkgroups identified in the system.