Update on the new P25 radio system. I live in Fayette County and know many of the leaders involved in public safety. The new P25 system is live and has been since last month as noted in previous comments. As is the case with any large system deployment, they're continuing to work out the bugs. It's going to be a great system for our first responders and lots of people have been working hard to get this system online. It's public knowledge that the system was purchased with encryption capabilities, as that was even in the publicly released bid specs when the county purchased the system.
At this time (today is Thanksgiving 11/24/22) encryption has not been turned on. I suppose they want to work out the bugs first and that's a good plan. As per the request of the forum moderators, I'll refrain from expressing a personal point of view about encryption.
If you have an SDS100 or SDS200, it's pretty easy to setup your scanner to listen to the new system. Here's an excellent video I used to help me manually program the system -
To the best of my knowledge, the system is using the same frequencies as the previous radio system. Those frequencies are:
851.3750
851.6875
851.9000
851.9250
852.7500
852.9250
853.4625
853.9000
853.9250
853.9750
For those of you who are amateur radio operators, this new system sounds a lot like DSTAR to me. I do not have a list of the new talk groups, but have begun to monitor and make my own notes based on what I hear. For example, I believe TG 23 is the Fayette County Jail, based on references to pods and cells and TG 3 is FCSO Dispatch. TG 171 appears to be FCFD Dispatch. I will continue to monitor and update this thread as I can.
73, KI4ASK / WRCL957
