Hancock County Newbie Questions

[wormwood1978]

I am relatively new to scanning and just purchased a Uniden BCD996P2 P25 scanner. I also have an older model Radioshack portable scanner. I am really only interested in hearing county and state police dispatching. I have no problem picking up county and think I figured out state police. I am a premium member here and used freescan to upload the county conventional and MSCommnet trunking for Bangor RCC but locked out all but the Cadillac Mnt, BaldMnt and BOMARC towers assuming everything else was out of range.

I think I'm getting everything I want from Hancock County Sheriff dispatching and Maine State Police Troop J for my area just my monitoring analog county sheriff dispatch on 155.05500 and analog Bangor RCC Cadillac Mnt (160.89000). I think Bald Mountain and BOMARC are too far from me. I would be interested in Ellsworth but reading on this forum makes me believe they are encrypted.

My question is this. By monitoring only these two analog frequencies and only wanting County Sheriff dispatch and Maine State Police dispatch from my immediate area, am I missing anything by limiting myself to only these two frequencies, is the P25 trunking doing anything for me?

 

[BlackSheepDue]

99% of MSCOMMNET trunked traffic that isn’t encrypted occurs on the zone primary so for the most part no, I wouldn’t say you’re missing much by monitoring the analog patch instead. Monitoring the trunking system would result in better audio quality but as far as patches go the zone primary ones sound pretty good. The state is only broken into 4 zones so you can’t focus your monitoring that much, certainly not just to Troop J. You really only want to monitor the closest tower to you. Monitoring multiple towers will only slow down your scanning and you won’t hear any more. Any tower in a zone broadcasts traffic for that entire zone. Some towers on the boarder of two zones will carry traffic for both zones but if you only concerned with Hancock county this isn’t important to you.

As far as Ellsworth goes they are not encrypted, they are DMR. The 996P2 generally does not come with DMR enabled but you can purchase a key for around $75 I believe to enable it.

Let me know if any of this doesn’t make sense or I left you with more questions than answers.

 

[wormwood1978]

Thank for your response and the correction on Ellsworth. I do recall reading about Ellsworth and DMR and just internalized it to mean I couldn't scan it.