I am from the Des Moines area. I got a SDS100 for christmas and am looking for help on programming. I listen to channels on Broadcastify and want to set up some favorites to mimic those channels. I am also trying to learn the important features of the SDS100 to make it easier to use. I am also trying to figure out all the different stuff(simulcast, Channels, Departments, etc.) that goes along with the broadcasts. I generally listen to PD, Fire, EMS and county stuff.I hope to get good enough that I can travel with the scanner and program on the fly. any help is more than welcome.
Jeff(CyBuzz73)
these should get you towards a good starting point with the basics
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wiki.radioreference.com
trunking: channels/talkgroups on a system use a set of frequencies that each tower send out
conventional: one frequency per channel (think FM radio in your car, weather radio, walkie talkies)
encryption: some DEPARTMENTS are entirely encrypted, some CHANNELS within a DEPARTMENT are encrypted, this depends on the agency preference. database will show DE, De, TE, or Te to mark encryption full time (capital E) or part time (lowercase E, could be nearly 100pct, could be nearly 0, could vary day to day). no scanner is capable of decoding encryption. the only way around this is to have a public safety radio with the encryption key programmed in. as you read on you might be able to figure out why the troopers can't hear any law enforcement transmissions from Polk county because of this. (DPS is on ISICS, Polk County is on SARA and law is largely encrypted).
an overly basic explanation of how the systems work for trunking....
SYSTEM is the entire radio setup. Iowa has ISICS and SARA primarily.
ISICS is the state ran system, Des Moines PD, Westcom (WDM, Urbandale, Clive, Waukee, Norwalk, Windsor Heights dispatch) are on ISICS. Towers maintained by the state
Polk County (sheriff and Ankeny, Altoona, Polk City, Mitchellville Police/Fire, saylor twp fire, etc) are on SARA. System managed by RACOM Corporation
DEPARTMENT is the entity on the SYSTEM. For example, I believe City of Des Moines is the DEPARTMENT for all of their CHANNELS (Police 1/2/3 etc, streets dept, trash dept water Dept etc). WDM is a different DEPARTMENT, police/fire/schools etc would have their CHANNELS.
CHANNELS are the individual talk groups these DEPARTMENTS use. WDM school bus gets a channel, Des Moines traffic engineers have a channel, state patrol has a channel (technically several), the CHANNELS available typically depends on the individual DEPARTMENT to assign what they need.
you don't need to worry about simulcast with the sds100 but essentially it is when multiple towers operate on the same frequencies at the same time and potentially jumbles transmissions for receivers not designed to interpret these signals coming from multiple towers (there's just barely enough of a delay, a split second, where the scanner freaks out. today's professional radios are built to work with this, the sds100/200 do a good job with it too).
programming.......two major ways to do this.
one, favorites lists. you decide which systems, departments, channels to listen for on a one by one basis. easiest to do with software. uniden released free software called Sentinel, I use Proscan, some people use Butel's ARC software. a radio reference/broadcastify premium subscription lets you import the data from radio reference to Proscan in which you can send the data to the scanner via USB (the sds200 also has an Ethernet port for this). as you get familiar with what you are listening to, what you want to hear that you aren't, and what you are hearing that you don't want to, this will be the ideal way in my opinion.
two....... zip code and service types. before you do this, update your master database using Sentinel software from uniden. if you just wanna hear stuff, put in your zip code and go to settings to enable and disable service types. the service types are dictated by what the radio reference database shows. this should give you enough leeway to hear some stuff but will also scan things you probably don't care about so there is potential for missing transmissions.
the nice part about favorites lists is you can set them up however you want. I prefer one list for ISICS and one for SARA and avoid channels I don't care about (next county over public safety, the landfill, etc). Some people go further and have lists for each county.
