Greene County Simulcast

[jackcf]

I'm in Greene County and use a 436HP which is not supposed to handle simulcast. As far as I can determine the RRDB indicates Green County is simulcast.
Is this accurate information? I get the LAW & Fire/EMS stuff just fine and I'm curious if Green County is really simulcast.

 

[radioscan]

Yes it is a simulcast system. Apparently you've found the sweet spot for reception. The digital simulcast distortion occurs when your receiver is getting inundated with signals from more than one tower and is unable to sort out the timing.

 

[jackcf]

Interesting.
So if take to another location say 5 miles down the road it may not work as well as it does here at home?

 

[wtp]

correct.

 

[jackcf]

Looks like I have some experimenting to do.
How do I recognize if I'm having a simulcast issue?

 

[TailGator911]

I am in neighboring Fairborn and I can confirm that Greene county is definitely simulcast. I consider myself to be in a sweet spot here at my QTH and before the SDS series scanners were introduced I battled simulcast using 3 digital scanners (WS1065, BCD536HP, TRX-1) all coupled to an 800mhz yagi 25-ft up on mast aimed at my nearest site located just behind the Nutter Center. One scanning ascending, one descending, and one back and forth. At times I did ok and could decipher until it got really busy and it all went to garbled nonsense, long silent gaps, and what sounded like control channels underwater. Needless to say, the SDS scanners made life easier and monitoring the public safety band more enjoyable. You move from that sweet spot and you'll most likely need an SDS100/200 to follow what is happening.

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

How do I recognize if I'm having a simulcast issue?

Have a read at the simulcast distortion wiki here

 

[jackcf]

With the P25 audio threshold set to AUTO I have been watching the ERROR rate and I typically get a an error rate of 0 and sometimes it will go up to 3.
What error rate do you think is high enough for it to start causing problems?

 

[dbsar]

I monitor in the southwest corner of the county and have suffered from simulcast distortion for years. I've got a Uniden HP2 and 396XT, both only getting about 3/4s of the transmissions. I'd hear parts of the transmission or nothing at all. Finally got an SDS100 and am really surprised how much I was missing (monitoring scanners side-by-side). The SDS solved the problem for me. On a side note, I am also getting much better reception (stock antenna's -all) too from neighboring jurisdictions.