Hello from Spring Texas outside of Houston. I have had a HP 2 for between 3 and 4 years and I am really upset with what I have. I even sent it in to be checked out and paid for the 2 county update. I cannot pick up anyting at all, except for some occational random traffic. I cannot pick up the Harris County law enforcement or fire/ambulance. Is this an antenna issue or do I need to cut my losses and try a different radio. It just has the stubby antenna it comes with. Really concerned with the amount of money already spent on this. Thank you for your time and assistance.
I'm presuming that you have updated the database in Sentinel, & written the update to the scanner. Are you using one or more Favorites list? Of just a location & range, along with the main database.
The system that you are trying to monitor,
TxWARN, covers your city, as well as Houston, Harris County, and the majority of the cities in the Houston Metro area. Unfortunately, from a scanner monitoring scenario, a great many of the transmit sites used are Simulcast. In a simulcast area, the same radio transmission, for a given talkgroup, is being transmitted from multiple locations, at the same time, all using the same frequency. Even though the time differential in those various signals arriving at your location is small, the 'echo effect' is still enough to impair, or even negate, the scanner's ability to monitor a given system.
A more complete explanation of Simulcast, and the problems it causes, can be found in the Wiki.
Simulcast digital distortion - The RadioReference Wiki
You are in Spring, in the northern part of Harris County,
This is a map showing the tower sites for Harris County Central Simulcast.
Link to that page:
Harris County Central Simulcast Site Details (Texas Wide Area Radio Network (TxWARN))
Each of those bullet points is a tower location. These are at various distances from you, and the out of synch signals give your HP-2 serious problems.
If you are trying to monitor Houston, the Houston Public Safety SImulcast is another one that may be problematic:
The most complete database of radio communications data
www.radioreference.com
You likely would have better luck with the Houston Public Safety Spring site:
I've circled the Spring site. The other markers are for other sites, that are on the same license, but using different frequencies. But that site is not going to carry as much radio traffic.
The only actual scanners that are able to handle the simulcast problems are Uniden's SDS100 & SDS200.
Other receivers that can deal with simulcast include the Unication pagers, as well as the
Blue Tail receiver.
See the Wiki page I linked above. In some cases, you might be able to get better reception with your HP-2 by using a directional antenna, aimed at one specific site, or "less" antenna, so that maybe the out of synch signals would be too weak to cause a problem.
Hopefuly, someone from the greater Houston area will respond, if they have a better, or alternate, method to try.
