Can I pick up activity in downtown Minneapolis (160 miles) from Duluth?
The answer to this is rather nuanced. Under normal day to day operations, distant agencies will not be able to be received on local control channels (except for the pedantic 'technically' folks with massive antenna arrays on their roofs that
@Whiskey3JMC was referring to), and you are typically limited to probably receiving your local site and the traffic that carries, and perhaps the sites immediately around your home site (although Duluth is a rather challenging place to listen from to begin with). From where I live in the northern exurbs, this is what i receive using my SDRs and a nooelec RaTLsnake M6 that sites on my desk:
The situations where you CAN hear traffic from far outside of your area, is when subscribers in your local area are affiliated with an interoperatibility, statewide, roaming, or special use talkgroup that is in use. There are a variety of reasons why this can occur, but typically it is because a radio was left on a statewide talkgroup unintentionally, sometimes, it is intentional (and a violation of SECB policy) so that a subscriber unit local to you can hear something that is 'interesting' to them (lots of LTAC1 traffic fits this), sometimes it occurs because it is a large coordinated operation and there are operational components local to you as well as in other areas of the state (you often see this when there is a lockdown event in the Department of Corrections, as their teams coordinate heavily between campuses in real time to handle a threat), sometimes there is a crosspatch in place (i will often see MSP St. Cloud patched with Mankato, Brainerd, or Detroit Lakes sometimes), and the final explanation is that there is a dispatch center using backup equipment (Mayo Ambulance dispatches from Rochester, State Patrol from Roseville or Rochester, North Memorial from Robbinsdale and Brooklyn Center, LifeLink from Bloomington, Allina from St. Paul, Sanford from Fargo, and ?Traverse County? from Willmar) as the system enables distant talkgroups to be used in the home site of their communications center in the event consoles fail or they use RF dispatch equipment.
I've never been to any of the counties to the north and west of Bemidji with my logging setup, but i have a large portion of their radios logged in Unitrunker because of this functionality with ARMER. In the last 6 hours on sites 2-002, 4-040, and 1-002, i've logged traffic from Cass Co ND, Mankato, Goodhue Co, Willmar, Alexandria, Owatonna, and Detroit Lakes.
