I'm also around Rosehill & E. broad ...I was getting nothing when just using the c- bus Marcs I entered the bixby and it immediately started working...I like to also listen to RPD,WPD,GPD of those only RPD is good...I just entered the Licking county cc it's good reception for the S.O. and Pataskala...I wonder if that electric power substation at Mc Naughten & Broad causes interference with the digital systems .It always did with analog on scanner & 610 AM when I was passing by ...I could at least with analog hear thru the distortion not so with digital .
Franklin County/Columbus P25 System Discussion
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ebuckeye
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I will have to try the Bixby site again, and separate my CC's into separate systems like was suggested. It is frustrating to listen to choppy audio. CPD main air on Franklin County tower is crystal clear, but CPD main air on Columbus City tower is not good, which I find strange. I too listen to RPD, which typically has good audio, and I managed to get the public works talk groups going, just not the best audio quality.
What is the difference between Columbus MARCS and Columbus City? Will both support all of Columbus' talkgroups and suburban talkgroups?
Is there any way to identify which system tower controls which talk groups?
What is the difference between Columbus MARCS and Columbus City? Will both support all of Columbus' talkgroups and suburban talkgroups?
Is there any way to identify which system tower controls which talk groups?
Columbus is one big simulcast site. So the channels are broadcast on all the towers
In the county system I guess you could program a radio/TG to only use the Bixby or Darby or whatever site but thats a lot of work for the radio programmer. Given how many people use the system
In the county system I guess you could program a radio/TG to only use the Bixby or Darby or whatever site but thats a lot of work for the radio programmer. Given how many people use the system
Columbus City has (or will have) All Columbus PD talkgroups, fire to soon follow, as well as all Columbus city services. This system will ONLY handle the City of Columbus radio traffic, unless other agencies temporarily affiliate with it for mutual aid and interoperability. You will find no suburban departments here.
Columbus MARCS, carries all the highway patrol, and state agencies, as well as many sheriff departments, hospitals, and a lot of other stuff. Most Columbus suburbs also live here. The respective agencies you can hear on this, also may have their own separate systems in the counties the agencies are in. It's kind of a "go to system" for interoperability. Columbus Police/Fire will not be found here, unless they temporarily affiliate.
Franklin County carries, or will carry all county owned services/agencies, such as the jail, sheriff, etc. Columbus police/fire, will not be found here, although, it appears 2 zones are simulcast here. (I have no idea if this is temporary for test purposes or not)
I bet there will be some tweaking, as dead spots or poor coverage is discovered.
COIRS is where Dublin, Worthington and Hilliard live. There are 2 sites. The DubWor site is where you find these agencies. You MAY hear the Delaware County SO affiliate here from time to time. The Delaware site is where you will hear all Delaware county agencies. Dublin, Hilliard, and Worthington MAY affiliate here from time to time.
Columbus Fire and Westerville Fire/PD are the only remaining agencies on the old Columbus analog system. I have no idea when/where Westerville is moving. CFD will move soon.
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Just to add to this, Upper Arlington from what I understand will be joining this system along with MECC. Also 1 ODOT TG will affiliate with this site now and that is the D06-FSP TG.
There are also a few Police and Fire depts on here such as Grove City, Reynoldsburg, and Prairie Twp.
From what I have heard Westerville PD/FD will be moving to the City site and have 5 backup TGs on COIRS.
ebuckeye
Member
Thank you all for the information. It has been helpful to say the least. I have reprogrammed at least three different times now using freescan, and plan on giving one more go to provide me with the best coverage. I think the kinks will be worked out. If I am not mistaken the Franklin County towers was one of the first to launch, assuming RPD is broadcasted through this system, and it seems to be getting better and better.
W8RMH
Feed Provider Since 2012
I receive RPD fine on the Franklin County SIM Site and always have. The only issues I have had with any MARCS-IP was when the Columbus City system came online, and just driving around the city CPD is 99% but in a building or a suburb it is a different story..
I got a 436 about a month ago. Talk about your culture shock, the last scanner I had was a 235. That being said what has worked for me is programming favorites that are narrow in scope. Then i can turn multiple favorites on and off as I please. For the CPD and FCSO digital groups, I brought down the Marcs IP system then deleted all the sites except for Columbus City. I can hear all the CPD channels, dispatch and TAC, and the FCSO dispatch and TAC channels. I have a separate favorite for fire and did the same to it for Columbus channels. I don't listen to CFD often so YMMV. As for the suburban fire groups I usually don't care for anything other than MECC because I live in Violet Twp. I honestly haven't listened for them either. I assume that the proper place to hear MECC and other previous Dept's that weren't on the Columbus analog system is on any MARCS IP site except Columbus City, Franklin County and Bixby Rd assuming the tower has an affiliated radio.
Anyways you have to keep in mind that Marcs IP is a smart system. Many sites have 3 or 4 channels to utilize including for control data. So only talk groups with site affiliated radios will transmit. So that's why Bixby Rd site misses some activity. Also keep in mind your scanner takes 2 seconds (so I've read) to scan a site. So if your scanner is scanning through all the nearby MARCS IP sites based on your location, it could be 20 seconds before it gets back to a site with the active talk group your listening or scanning for.
I found using the full database works great outside of Franklin Co where there isn't so many sites.
As for audio, the actual audio stream sounds very well if you enable the AGC. It sounds a lot like having a real radio. Some users aren't used to digital audio and from that standpoint, digital audio is unforgiving of over driven audio. Some users are just loud.
Audio distortion, I'm going to bring up an old old subject. Back when Nextel was around, it became known that the Nextel burst technology caused problems with public safety radio systems. That triggered the whole rebanding thing where Sprint now owns the upper 8 MHz of the 800 band and public safety had to move to the lower part of the band. Enter today where Sprint's 800 band 26 CDMA and wideband FDD LTE still causes interference with public safety. As I would be near sprint towers, I would notice the analog columbus 800 system would have a lot of interference. I have heard distortions also on digital. If anyone wants a sprint tower map, I'd be glad to send you one and you can do your own experimentation. It makes sense that cell site density increases near downtown as there are more pops to cover.
Last comment for now, I read a few pages back about people using what sounded like a personal MTS2000 radio to monitor the systems and planning on getting a XTS5000 to monitor digital. I'm aware you can program a TX inhibit switch to prevent the radio from transmitting. That would also cover affiliation. But now you lose control over site to site monitoring right unless you program a zone for each site? Here's the big question, dobyou just go to the radio shop and ask for the system key? I'm sure they share between departments and service centers but to monitor the system you need the system key. Also I have been told emphatically that no personal radios are allowed on the system. When we need to do testing of BDAs I can walk in and borrow a couple of city owned radios programmed with every channel imaginable and go to town. I wouldn't expect the same of the system key.
Anyways you have to keep in mind that Marcs IP is a smart system. Many sites have 3 or 4 channels to utilize including for control data. So only talk groups with site affiliated radios will transmit. So that's why Bixby Rd site misses some activity. Also keep in mind your scanner takes 2 seconds (so I've read) to scan a site. So if your scanner is scanning through all the nearby MARCS IP sites based on your location, it could be 20 seconds before it gets back to a site with the active talk group your listening or scanning for.
I found using the full database works great outside of Franklin Co where there isn't so many sites.
As for audio, the actual audio stream sounds very well if you enable the AGC. It sounds a lot like having a real radio. Some users aren't used to digital audio and from that standpoint, digital audio is unforgiving of over driven audio. Some users are just loud.
Audio distortion, I'm going to bring up an old old subject. Back when Nextel was around, it became known that the Nextel burst technology caused problems with public safety radio systems. That triggered the whole rebanding thing where Sprint now owns the upper 8 MHz of the 800 band and public safety had to move to the lower part of the band. Enter today where Sprint's 800 band 26 CDMA and wideband FDD LTE still causes interference with public safety. As I would be near sprint towers, I would notice the analog columbus 800 system would have a lot of interference. I have heard distortions also on digital. If anyone wants a sprint tower map, I'd be glad to send you one and you can do your own experimentation. It makes sense that cell site density increases near downtown as there are more pops to cover.
Last comment for now, I read a few pages back about people using what sounded like a personal MTS2000 radio to monitor the systems and planning on getting a XTS5000 to monitor digital. I'm aware you can program a TX inhibit switch to prevent the radio from transmitting. That would also cover affiliation. But now you lose control over site to site monitoring right unless you program a zone for each site? Here's the big question, dobyou just go to the radio shop and ask for the system key? I'm sure they share between departments and service centers but to monitor the system you need the system key. Also I have been told emphatically that no personal radios are allowed on the system. When we need to do testing of BDAs I can walk in and borrow a couple of city owned radios programmed with every channel imaginable and go to town. I wouldn't expect the same of the system key.
Robert43055
Member
how's to reception on the 436? how you taken it around to different locations around the city
I think for 800 it's pretty decent. I live about 10 minutes from Lancaster and I can pick up both of the Columbus systems. I think the UHF/460 range is pretty bad as there are county wide dispatch channels in Fairfield County that I can't pick up well being well inside the county boundaries. VHF seems hit and miss; I can hear air traffic around Fairfield County Airport on the Saturday morning fly-ins but have a lot of trouble picking up the air traffic around Port Columbus. For example I was just south of OSU campus for red white and boom. There were aircraft departing Port Columbus and most of the audio was scratchy at best.
ebuckeye
Member
Thank you for the insight. Most of it made sense to me. I did some testing around the city with my 396xt, monitoring the Columbus City system for the most part. Where I am, northwest part of Reynoldsburg, the coverage is spotty. I drove out towards Pickerington and, my radio was searching for the control channel, until I drove west towards Brice road, then it began working again. Once I was on 270 and even when I made it to Downtown, the audio was great. Franklin County towers seem to be good no matter where I am and I have had little success with the Columbus MARCS system. I will have to check into the AGC feature, and consider programming the full database, or upgrading to a newer scanner.
W8RMH
Feed Provider Since 2012
I use a 2 second delay. If it is taking 20 seconds you may have your Hold settings too high. Scanners do not scan talk groups they only scan the control channels so locking out TGs has no effect. I have a city site and county site for each city, county, and fire, roughly seven systems/sites with every single TG programmed and it all scans in just a few seconds.
Using the county sites to monitor the city will be unreliable as city units do not always affiliate with a county site.
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The performance you describe of the Columbus City system is interesting. When you say N/W Rburg, I'm thinking around what used to be Lucent, Mount Carmel East area. The Columbus City system is a six site simulcast system and the closest tower to you is at Groves and Hamilton next to the grain elevator. That thing should be screaming at you. Going into Pickerington I could understand the signal being weaker, I guess it depends on where in Pickerington you go. In fact I exited US33 at Diley Rd today. While near the Sprint cell the signal was all over the place and any audio was just bad. Once I got under the Sprint cell's umbrella or between the tower's antennas or out of range of that cell (like a half mile) I actually had full strength driving east. This with the stock antenna.
W8RMH
Feed Provider Since 2012
This is a simulcast system It is not about reception it is about multi-path distortion. When you got near the cell tower it was blocking the other sites so you where only hearing the one tower thus eliminating the multi-path effect.
I also am in Northwest R-Burg ...same issues you have ...Have you experimented with ROAM,STAT,OFF/ON while at home ...I'm thinking that if Groves & Hamilton site is our closest why not option to OFF as that seems like it would not need to search for other sites...Are we in close proximity to a cell tower...Mc & E. Broad transformers could be hosing things up.
I adjusted my BCD996XTs P25 settings as a last resort (Adjust Mode to 8, Adjust Level to 200), and to my surprise, the Columbus City site is listenable now. Not perfect by any means but at least listenable. YMMV, but this is what worked for me.
Also, I am picking up most of the FCSO talk groups on the City site.
Also, I am picking up most of the FCSO talk groups on the City site.
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