ISP Zone/Dist scanning on P25

[Linneweh]

I would like to program my BCD396XT for the Illinois State Police by Zone and/or District, for traveling in the state. My question is how do I decide which “sites” I need to put in, to cover the Zone/Districts? I tried using the whole state “site” list, but the scan time is too long. If I could scan only the 3-9 sites, needed for the area, it would be much better. I looked at doing it by “county” but some have multiple “sites” and others don’t show any “sites”, maybe listed for a town.
Is there a breakdown of “sites” for each Zone/District?
Any impute will be appreciated.

 

[VASCAR2]

The easiest way I know to program the scanner is by region. SC21 uses three site controllers, North, Central, South. The northern area is basically north of I 80, the central between I 80 and I 70. The southern region is the St Louis metro area and south of I 70. Program the control channels with the site beginning with 3 as southern part of the State, ie 3-002 Sumner/ Lawrence Co, site 3-003 Mt. Carmel /Wabash Co. Central area will begin with 2-??? and northern will be 1-???.

Whenever your in a particular region of the state select only that 1/3. This will cut the number of control channels being scanned down by 2/3. The same frequencies are used on multiple sites throughout the state but separated by distance so there is no interference. It won't matter that a frequency is entered into each of the 3 regions.

 

[stevelton]

I have a Radio Shack pro-197, and the way I have mine programmed is I have a "local Starcom system", which only has the 3 very closest towers to me, and only D19 A, B, the patches, and Car2Car. Then I have my Zone 3 system with pretty much all the control channels in use in Southern IL.
The system I have for local I have set as the number 1 scan list, and zone 3 as the number 2 scan list. That way if there is something going on just in my district, I can quickly only monitor the most important talkgroups, using only the closest sites with the push of a button.
Then for the rest of the state if I decide to take a road trip, using the RR database, I made a spread sheet of all the primary and secondary control channels for each zone. I sorted these frequencies, and deleted all the duplicate ones. This left me with 3 different lists, of the unique frequencies in each zone (about 30-50 per zone). And made a system to support all of them (about 4 different systems). After all that, I saved this in a v-folder, since I wouldnt be using them very often. As for the talk groups, I went through and made TGIDs for each district disp A and B, IDOT, IEMA F-1, and a few other ones I think I would really need to be reminded of what they were. Then everything else comes through on the wildcard.
Steven