Thanks Lou
Everybody in Michigan and their brother is migrating to the P25 system which I know nothing about. I live in Clare County and there is also a city named Clare. The Clare County page mentions the city uses P25 but they are not listed on the P25 page. There is no mention of the County police moving to P25 but they ARE listed on the P25 page. Some of the listings on the P25 must be future use because they still have fire & ambulance dispatch, EMS-hospital on VHF. What does "Clare Police - Proprietary Law Talk" mean? On old VHF scanners you could scan and pick up a freq, listen and figure out who it was. How in the world can you randomly scan 800 mhz and figure anything out? Seems like you would have to have the info before you start.
Let me address the Clare Co SO and Clare City issue first. The Clare PD appear to be using a channel on the system which is reserved for them. This seems to be something used throughout the system and called "Proprietary" although why I don't know, you would have to ask the regional DB Admins that question. I am assuming this means they don't share the channel with anyone else. The fact that all the towns in Clare Co. who are using the state P25 system are listed in the county block, this is quite common in the DB unless the local town has lots of talk groups (TGs).
Now as to still being on VHF, that doesn't preclude them from being on the MPSCS system also. Quite often, especially in a transition period, the old VHF (or UHF) conventional channels will be patched to the appropriate TG on the trunking system and the transmissions can be heard on either. The reason, well those P25 trunking radios are not cheap and sometimes an agency cannot afford to move everybody at the same time. This is especially true in regard to volunteer EMS and Fire departments.
As for looking for "new" TGs, well all the TGs you see listed are found the same way, someone listened, noticed a new TG, monitored it (or recorded it) until they figured out what it was then submitted it to the DB for inclusion. Note, that is exactly what you described as the process in the "old" days. How to do it, well you need to understand the whole trunking concept first. Then there are several software packages out there (for free) that will allow you to monitor and record new TGs on a TRS. Some require two radios, some one. It all depends on what radio you are using and how interested you are in the process. A pretty fair one for use with Uniden radios that only requires one radio and still allows you to actually listen while it works is
IDTracker (comes in 3 versions) depending on radio model and type. But all of this, I think, is beyond your initial question and followup.
