Colorado-Scanning PD/FD/EMS while driving through most of the State

[KTR722]

Our family is traveling through Colorado for a few weeks and doing almost a full lap of the State (Co Spgs>Denver>Boulder>Estes Park>Aspen>Glenwood Spgs>Telluride>Ouray>Durango). I have a SDS200 with GPS and wanted to plug in PD/FD/EMS along with some Ranger/SAR freqs/TGIDs while we traverse the State. Looks like much of the state is on DTRS and I have programmed that along with many of the county conventional channels where we are passing through already.

A few questions, I see many cites with both P25 DTRS and conventional for the same agencies (PD/FD...), I presume that if they are on DTRS then those conventional freqs are for paging or backup, is that a good assumption? Where I live (Central TX), almost everyone is on P25 and conventional is strictly paging.

I also see Colorado State Patrol on both DTRS and conventional, is that also a good assumption that they are on DTRS when its available and conventional where its not?

I also see a few cities with their own P25 systems not on DTRS (MARC, Aurora, Denver, Boulder). Denver's P25 doesn't look worth programming into the radio as its almost all encrypted for emergency ops. Are there any other P25 or other trunk systems that I should include in my programming for any of the cities on that route above?

Any specific suggestions on any of these cities (Co Spgs, Estes Park, Aspen, Glenwood Spgs, Telluride), as we will be there for a few days each?

Any other general feedback or suggestions (other talkgroups/freqs to listen into, what to listen to besides FD/PD/EMS, etc)

Thanks in advance!

 

[rbuxton]

Down in my neck of the woods (SW Colorado) most, if not all, agencies are on the DTRS. VHF freqs are used for paging and/or backup when out of range of the DTRS. CSP uses VHF for car-to-car comms. CSP Dispatch can, and does, use VHF when cars are out of range of DTRS, however rare. The RRDB for SW Colorado (La Plata, Montezuma, San Juan) is about as accurate as it can be. Can't speak for any other places in the state.

 

[eyes00only]

Our family is traveling through Colorado for a few weeks and doing almost a full lap of the State (Co Spgs>Denver>Boulder>Estes Park>Aspen>Glenwood Spgs>Telluride>Ouray>Durango). I have a SDS200 with GPS and wanted to plug in PD/FD/EMS along with some Ranger/SAR freqs/TGIDs while we traverse the State. Looks like much of the state is on DTRS and I have programmed that along with many of the county conventional channels where we are passing through already.

A few questions, I see many cites with both P25 DTRS and conventional for the same agencies (PD/FD...), I presume that if they are on DTRS then those conventional freqs are for paging or backup, is that a good assumption? Where I live (Central TX), almost everyone is on P25 and conventional is strictly paging.

I also see Colorado State Patrol on both DTRS and conventional, is that also a good assumption that they are on DTRS when its available and conventional where its not?

I also see a few cities with their own P25 systems not on DTRS (MARC, Aurora, Denver, Boulder). Denver's P25 doesn't look worth programming into the radio as its almost all encrypted for emergency ops. Are there any other P25 or other trunk systems that I should include in my programming for any of the cities on that route above?

Any specific suggestions on any of these cities (Co Spgs, Estes Park, Aspen, Glenwood Spgs, Telluride), as we will be there for a few days each?

Any other general feedback or suggestions (other talkgroups/freqs to listen into, what to listen to besides FD/PD/EMS, etc)

Thanks in advance!

Be aware that A LOT of encryption and simulcast is used in Colorado. Also the CSP use patches often which can be confusing.
Enjoy your trip!

 

[natedawg1604]

Our family is traveling through Colorado for a few weeks and doing almost a full lap of the State (Co Spgs>Denver>Boulder>Estes Park>Aspen>Glenwood Spgs>Telluride>Ouray>Durango). I have a SDS200 with GPS and wanted to plug in PD/FD/EMS along with some Ranger/SAR freqs/TGIDs while we traverse the State. Looks like much of the state is on DTRS and I have programmed that along with many of the county conventional channels where we are passing through already.

A few questions, I see many cites with both P25 DTRS and conventional for the same agencies (PD/FD...), I presume that if they are on DTRS then those conventional freqs are for paging or backup, is that a good assumption? Where I live (Central TX), almost everyone is on P25 and conventional is strictly paging.

I also see Colorado State Patrol on both DTRS and conventional, is that also a good assumption that they are on DTRS when its available and conventional where its not?

I also see a few cities with their own P25 systems not on DTRS (MARC, Aurora, Denver, Boulder). Denver's P25 doesn't look worth programming into the radio as its almost all encrypted for emergency ops. Are there any other P25 or other trunk systems that I should include in my programming for any of the cities on that route above?

Any specific suggestions on any of these cities (Co Spgs, Estes Park, Aspen, Glenwood Spgs, Telluride), as we will be there for a few days each?

Any other general feedback or suggestions (other talkgroups/freqs to listen into, what to listen to besides FD/PD/EMS, etc)

Thanks in advance!

You are on the right track. Unfortunately most LE in the Denver-Metro area has gone ENC. The RR database is very up-to-date for ENC status. Except for Denver Fire (not EMS), all other fire/ems agencies in the Metro area can still be monitored. There are also numerous agencies on their own standalone systems in the Denver-Metro area, which makes it hard with a single radio. While in the Estes Park area, you may want to the monitor the Rocky Mountain National Park system, it's on the Federal VHF band (there is a very comprehensive listing in the "Federal" Menu section).

You can still sometimes hear big LE incidents on Blue NWF talkgroups in the Metro Area as well as the State MAC channels, but for someone traveling through for a short time you may or may not hear anything on those.

As to State Patrol, the vast majority of comms are on DTRS. VHF is available but rarely used; AFAIK most CSP vehicles are still equipped with VHF radios, but they don't use it much. There are numerous counties showing LE agencies with VHF repeaters that haven't been used in years or that have been re-purposed; honestly I should take some responsibility for that and submit some updates.

And as you alluded to, there are also numerous VHF repeaters listed for fire agencies, that are now only used for initial tone-outs. However some are still in use.

As someone whose spent entirely too much time monitoring DTRS, while traveling the best way to ensure you hear the most amount of talkgroups is to check for activity on every site you can pick up where you're at. This is not ideal while driving, but it's just a fact of life. If you have time, find a good spot to pull over every once in a while and spend five-10 minutes switching between sites. Some sites give you great coverage but are practically dead, while another site may have lots of activity. Sometimes I'll find a good rest area or gas station to pull over at, and flip through several different sites to check for relative activity levels.

I have pretty much every DTRS site programmed in my SDS100 on separate quick keys, as 4 "systems" under 4 different favorites lists broken up by geographic areas. It works great. However, I live here and I travel through various parts of Colorado somewhat regularly, and I'm pretty familiar with what DTRS sites I can pick up in various areas.

Honestly for someone just traveling through the area, it might be better just to try the GPS location-based feature. I've always hated the GPS feature because you give up control on what you can monitor, but I it may be quite useful when you're trying to monitor a huge system like DTRS for a short amount of time. Programming a huge system like DTRS "manually" with quick keys is very time intensive, if you don't monitor it very often location-based scanning may be more practical.

 

[Spitfire8520]

The only other thing noteworthy that has yet to be mentioned is that Boulder County and the City of Boulder are both special cases. Boulder County operates with a hybrid system of VHF and DTRS, which are patched together, where the eastern plains agencies primarily uses DTRS while the western mountain agencies primarily uses VHF. The City of Boulder is in them middle of a system transition to P25 which has been dragging, so it is likely they will still be on VHF during your travels.

Along the route between Denver and Boulder, you will briefly be in areas covered by agencies working on the FRCC and Westminster systems.

Summit County is also in the middle of a VHF to DTRS transition and might be split between the two systems for when you are passing through from Estes Park to Aspen.

The big incident talkgroups are okay to have, but 99% of the time they are tied up by the special task force types doing their thing which may or may not be interesting for you to listen to.

Hopefully, GPS works for your case. In the past several years, the database for DTRS underwent major partitioning, without any local input, which introduced a lot of arbitrary and conservative ranges for many of the talkgroup categories. You may have to increase your receive range in the rural areas due to the conservative ranges, especially for fire departments as their coverage areas tend to be significantly larger than the communities they are named after. Unfortunately, this may bog down your scanner a bit as there are many places where you can receive a large number of sites simultaneously due to overlap and long propagation distances for many of the sites, especially along the Front Range.

 

[KTR722]

Thanks for all the responses! GPS worked very well throughout the state on the SDS200 and I highly recommend it. DTRS is a pretty nice statewide system and when I connected to a solid tower I was able to hear quite a bit. Cell service was pretty spotty so traveling through Colorado hoping to monitor via Broadcastify (and not use an actual scanner) is a non-starter unless you are in a metro area. I was able to pickup RMNP on both DTRS and conventional, seemed to hear more traffic on the conventional channels; cant confirm but I think most of the LE was on DTRS (Rangers were using "Romo ###" call signs) and the other staff mostly conventional.

One issue that I ran into was that, at some points, DTRS was trying to connect to multiple towers (sometimes as many as 9), and only getting signal on 1 or 2 at the most, which kept the SDS scanning on "dead" towers for a good chunk of the time. With only 1 scanner, once you scan-locked into a single solid P25 tower, you lost all ability to scan any of the conventional channels. If I had unlimited $$$, the ideal setup would be two SDS200's, one setup to scan only conventional channels and the other dedicated to scan DTRS (and other trunk systems); and just lock the trunk scanner on a strong P25 tower until you lose signal, then scan for the next tower to leap frog to, leaving the other scanner to just scan conventional frequencies.

One other modification I did to my programming (I use Proscan just FYI) was that, for Trunk tower/freq configuration groups, I would use the recommended Location Range from RR, but for the actual TGID groups, I would manually bump these up to at least 25 mile ranges so, if I was connected to a tower that was carrying this traffic, I would likely hear it, even if i wasn't exactly inside the city limits (some of these small cities have ranges in the RR database of only 3 miles.