Coming to Newfoundland!

[Jay911]

Watch out sports fans, I will be on the ground at YYT on September 9 for about 2 weeks. The first half of my trip involves volunteering for Targa, so I won't be able to meet up with anyone or spend any time hanging out, but I will be tweeting and posting on the forums (now that I have a phone that actually has coverage on the rock.. crossing fingers!!).

I am in the process of taking a large chunk of both the TAFL for the island as well as all the info we have here in the NL part of the DB, and stuffing it into my HomePatrols. Both of them, and some other scanners, will be coming with me on this trip. With the Extreme upgrades, having these devices churning away in my vehicle while I'm roaming the island is going to make for a ton of submissions and updates come the end of my trip, I'll bet!

 

[LowbandGuy]

Sounds like a very interesting trip, enjoy!

 

[Jay911]

While preparing to program my scanners, I found some interesting data in St John's in the TAFL relating to the EDACS system. Also a second potential commercial (Bell) trunk for the metro area. I'll get back to you all on this when I study it "first hand".

 

[Jay911]

NPR EDACS: St. John's sites 13 and 14 and 16 confirmed per TAFL data and direct monitoring. Site 24 confirmed as Bell Island from same methods. Going to do some more today and tomorrow around my Targa duties.

Also found two "new" trunk systems - Bell Mobility has an 800MHz LTR in use, and "St John's Trunking" (license name - clearly city of St John's) is a 5 freq UHF LTR trunk for public works crews.

All of the above either has been or soon will be submitted to the DB.

 

[Jay911]

Gander: P25 site is 033-001 (pretty sure, will look again later) on 155.64.

 

[Jay911]

Posting here (from my phone) to remember to submit it when I get Internet service later.

Marystown: still EDACS, now SCAT 155.58. No idea who is now 15.

RCMP P25: Gander 033-001 155.28 155.64 160.485, Clarenville 041-001 153.29 155.97, Pt Leamington 031-001 153.29 155.88, Come by Chance 046-001 155.82 159.06, Musgrave Harbour 0xx-001 (forgot #, will check logs) 155.97

 

[Jay911]

EDACS site 15 covers the area of Carbonear, Brigus, and CBS-ish.

MUN security on 451.4625 is inverted non-encrypted TRBO, DSD will decode it.

Hitech appears to have a 3-freq LTR system in the 422MHz region. Hard to tell if anyone's using it because there are only idle bursts this time of night.

The area where the EDACS system "stops" and the P25 system "starts" is not as clear-cut as you might think. There are sites on the P25 system as far south as Come by Chance (area - actual location unconfirmed). There are EDACS sites as far north as Colliers/Conception Harbour, and Marystown.

Interestingly enough, the decimal values of the talkgroups in both the P25 and EDACS systems appears to be the same. For example, on the P25 system, the Clarenville area TG is 532. On the EDACS system, when Clarenville had a TG there, it was 04-024, which is 532 when you convert it to decimal. Note - this isn't to imply that there is any patch or conversion in progress - it's just the programmer making things easy for himself. That having been said, some of the TGs that are listed on the old EDACS system are probably the right values for the subsequent P25 sites (if they exist).

Also check your zone/site numbers - all the ones I encountered were 0xx-001, i.e. 046-001, 031-001, etc.

One more thing - on the GNL LTR Passport site frequencies, I have been hearing what might be MotoTRBO or NEXEDGE on some frequencies. Will try to listen in again as time goes by (in the few days I have left before I return to the west side of the country).

 

[ve1sef]

The shared id numbers between the EDACS and P25 caught my attention last year when I was over.
I thought I had a P25 signal near Come-by-Change but it wasn't clear enough to figure out which detachment.
Have you been down around the southern Avalon? I had to program the sites as separate SCAT sites.
You have any problems in that region?

 

[Jay911]

The shared numbers may extend further than that. I've noticed that RCMP dispatch on the EDACS system uses numbers in the low 5000s. RCMP dispatch on the P25 system is in the 4115000s too.

I have had problems with SCAT sites. My main scanners for receiving are a pair of HomePatrols. I'm only using my 396XT and PSR500 for trunk decoding (and the PSR800 for the same, and for TRBO/NXDN decode attempts). I can't get SCAT to work at all on the HP1 scanners - and I've tried them both as sites included on the master EDACS system and as new standalone systems on their own.

I have found that looking at the activity logs from my HP1s have given me a ton more P25 sites than I remember finding. I have 028-001, 031-001, 033-001, 034-001, 036-001, 041-001, and 046-001 and I'm not even halfway through my logs. Not only that, but I get the transmit AND receive LCNs listed for both the voice channels and control channels. That gives me more frequencies to search as I roam through the province (that's how I discovered some of the ones listed above, as I think about it now).

I have to get back to Calgary from Gander on Wednesday, but I'm going to try to drive around on the TCH as far as I can in the next few days before having to head back. We'll see what I get.

 

[Jay911]

As I said in the other thread (the St Georges P25 thread), I have just submitted a ton of info - both for the P25 system and the EDACS one. It'll get worked as the admins have time for them.

I found a bunch of SCAT sites today. What I did was put all the frequencies in my PSR500 twice: Once in a conventional bank, and once in a TSYS (actually two, since there are more than 32 frequencies). I let the scanner monitor the conventional frequencies, and when I heard a control channel, I switched to the TSYS and let Unitrunker run. I found a whole bunch of EDACS sites (as mentioned) and a bunch of P25 sites. (If you're going to do that, you need two sets of TSYS objects, one set as EDACS, the other P25.) Most will be put into the DB, but there are a few that I don't have sufficient details for:

- EDACS has a site 18 that is a neighbor of one of the SCAT sites (I think Arnold's Cove). All I know is that it has an LCN 1 which is the current control channel. I'd presume it's not SCAT since it's reporting a site number other than 1.
- P25 has a 22-1 which I've seen in Gander but not monitored (Gander is another site, I don't know where 22-1 is - just had a CC for a few seconds). Maybe I'll find it tomorrow.
- P25 sites/systems, oddly enough, do not have neighbor sites. I don't know why. I presume it was designed that way. Maybe P25 doesn't have neighbors across zones.
- Also mentioned in the St George's thread, at least some if not all of the sites have their voice channel constantly transmitting dead air (in digital modulation) when they are not passing actual voice audio. Kind of makes it easy to pin down a voice channel if you're not patient enough to wait for a talkgroup grant. Not sure why they're doing this either. This is the source of the "channel hanging up" behavior people are reporting.

 

[Jay911]

Well, I'm getting ready to wrap up my trip, sitting in a hotel in Gander, watching a show about the 9/11 10th anniversary get-together held last Sunday, and feeling proud of all that happened here. Every year I've done Targa, either as a spectator or a volunteer, I've been in Gander either exactly on September 11th, or in the week surrounding. I know it's not the topic of this thread, but I feel the need to mention it because of how great I feel about how Gander, the entire province, and the country responded to the crisis.

Anyway, I had a great time messing around with my scanners, and got a tremendous amount of experience "sleuthing out" the undiscovered sites of the P25 system (and some other trunk systems). This will be awesome practice for figuring out the system in Alberta when it goes live next year.

First some general comments on scanning here:

1. If you have the funds, you really want to get a HomePatrol. I had two with me for this trip and for the most part, left one with only Fire/EMS/Police service tags enabled and one with all the others enabled, and let 'er rip. I have 1.11GB of audio recordings to go over once I get home, in order to figure out what channels are what. (I built up a favorites file with all the stuff from the TAFL in it and just let the scanner stop on whatever it would find.) That doesn't include the Discovery Mode stuff, where I told the scanner to search a specific section of the airwaves and record anything that it stops on. You can't go wrong with the HP1. I will be keeping my favorites file, which I can export as an HPE file for other people with the HomePatrol Sentinel software to import.

2. I am reasonably certain that the RCMP P25 system is co-locating at least some of its towers with Bell Aliant. With my amplified external antenna on the car, I was getting significant overload on VHF frequencies when I got close to certain towers - I could hear the P25 control channel signal bleeding in over other transmissions (and even when there were no other transmissions going on). Some of them were Bell Aliant towers (the MobileTAFL app for the iPhone is super handy - just ask it to tell you what's closest to you and it shows up).

3. I have an absolute ton of data for the P25 system to put in. Some of it has already been submitted, some I'll try to submit tonight, and some may need to wait until I have time to sort things out back home. Some I've already posted in this thread, and in the other thread on St George's. I also have lots of info on the NE Avalon EDACS system (most of it is already submitted), and as I said earlier, hundreds of conventional channels to fill in as well.

4. I fully intend to be here next year for both Targa and family commitments, and as well, a fire chief's convention. Maybe we can get in touch then! In the meantime, I intend to keep in touch, and if anyone wants the HPE data prior to me submitting it to the DB, please let me know.

 

[ve1sef]

Did you pick-up anything from Parks Canada in your travels?
You driving home, through Nova Scotia?

 

[Jay911]

I believe I picked up some Parks Canada stuff.. maybe I'll look at it today.

No, I was supposed to be flying home from Gander via Air Canada at 0600 this morning. As per their website, they got a deal established with their FAs yesterday afternoon and it's "business as usual" today.. which TOTALLY explains why I arrived at the airport at 0445 to find that the flight had been cancelled, "due to the strike" !!

"We put you on the same flight tomorrow. There's nothing else we can do," the ACA Jazz "customer service" agent told me before turning away from me at the counter.

So I'm sitting in my hotel room in Gander (luckily the fine folks at the Albatross Hotel let me take my room back). Maybe I'll work through some of the discovery logs I ran over the past week and change.

This is proof positive why I always need to remember that I always fly WestJet.

 

[hfxChris]

If you weren't in Gander (and didn't live in Alberta) I would say you should be flying Porter!

 

[jlo]

that's great news with the find Jay.
can't wait to load up.once it's in the DB.
i have three scat sites working on all three of my scanners.
pro 106, 396xt, and bct8.

 

[jlo]

MUN security on 451.4625 is inverted non-encrypted TRBO, DSD will decode it

Jay911
what scanner can decode the local mun security

 

[Jay911]

No scanner currently available will let you listen to TRBO. However, if you take a scanner that has a discriminator tap installed, and feed discriminator audio into the program called "DSD" (which runs on computers on the Linux operating system), the computer can decode TRBO just fine.

Look at this thread http://forums.radioreference.com/di...1-2-3-released.html?highlight=mototrbo+decode for details on DSD.

 

[primehifi]

mun security has proven to be a little tricky to decode. Uncertain if quality of signal may be an issue or not. But it will decode, it's just not great and hard to listen.

Jay, for a while now I've been hearing RCMP on 158.5800. I found it just doing a blind scan a while ago. It isn't in the DB however and usually, tx on the 158.5800 freq are not found on the edacs system when I scan it.

Thoughts? Like I said, it isn't in the DB. Interestingly, it does show up as a control channel for PAB's p25 system. I'm in St. John's.

Oh also, there's a system, likely Mount Pearl's new municipal at 422/427.1750,3000,4250,5500 which Robsterw said is nexedge. DSD should do it, no luck yet.

Been scanning the new St. John's municipal LTR and nothing yet, just the ltr clicks.

 

[Jay911]

Without knowing where you are, nothing comes to mind.

I have submitted a ton of things to the DB which haven't been worked yet, let me see..

Unworked submission says 158.58 is a SCAT site in Sunnyside.

You might not hear transmissions on other sites simply because nobody is affiliated to that site. The system won't send signals to sites where there won't be anyone to listen.

 

[primehifi]

Yeah sorry I mentioned in the edited version of my previous post that I'm in St. John's.

I'm anxiously awaiting more of your updates to the db. I recently decided to upgrade my bct15x to the homepatrol. It was 100% whim and 100% based on your remarks a few pages back lol.

That's what I get for browsing RR late at night and having a credit card handy I guess.