Is this possible...

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kf5qgf

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Feb 12, 2012
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Olive Branch, MS
I'm still new to scanning and learning alot along the way. I was wondering of something, I added a signal booster (standard thing, you get it from wal-mart, maybe $30) and it has an amplification of 24dB, really helped me pick up the rail yard that's about 7 miles north of me, and helped pick up the airport that's 12 miles west of me, but the repeater tower for my county's public safety is a motorola type II trunking system, and it seems while I had the amplifier hooked up it went almost completely silent. There's 100 talk groups programmed in, 20 are pretty busy, but nearly nothing. I disconnected it about an hour later and it's back to the normal chatter. My reception on the control channel is a solid 99%, so finally, here's the question.

Is it possible that amplifying an already STRONG signal caused my reception to actually black out? I have a pro-163 and the trunking system is 100w just 2 miles away. Just bouncin questions around..

Craighttp://forums.radioreference.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
 

kf7yn

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West Jordan, UT
Yep, the signal booster is overloading (desensitizing) your receiver on the public safety system but helps on the rail and airport comms. I have the same problem at my location. You might also experiment with attenuation on the trunked system so you don't have to hook up and remove the booster all the time..
 

UPMan

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Arlington, TX
What you probably got was a VHF/UHF TV Signal booster. You are seeing some positive effect for air and railroad because they are both VHF (108-180 MHz) services. The trunked system you mention operates on 800 MHz frequencies, so instead of boosting those signals, it is pretty effectively blocking them. Likly not desense due to overload, but just never making it through the amp.
 

GrumpyGuard

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Oct 6, 2003
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NEWBERG
You might want to get a pre-amp that is designed for scanners/radios. Scanner Master has several to choose from. They are not cheap, but they will not cause unwanted problems. You may want to purchase an inexpensive vhf/uhf scanner for listening to air and rail traffic. You can look in the RR Classifeid section or check out e-bay as well. Then you can use your trunking scanner to listen to your local system.
 

kf5qgf

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Feb 12, 2012
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145
Location
Olive Branch, MS
Thank you

Thank you everyone for the replies. I tried attentuating my trunking system to still no avail. I was getting a few transmissions through, but maybe 12 an hour versus the normal 60-70 an hour. I removed it for the time being, and am gonna look at the items on scanner master, thanks everyone for the advice. Still learning my way through this and it's a constant trial and error.

Craig
 
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