las vegas programming

[browzer55]

just bought a bc346xt and want to program it,..I have a membership and tried the software already,.. had my scanner hooked up to laptop and imported hotels and casinos,..lol,.. I know that's a lot!! so I ended up resetting my scanner and now want to start over,..so I guess my question is.... Is there anyone from las vegas here that can show me some cool frequencies to program into my scanner?" I like any police or security chatter,.. and by the way.. I know I cant scan las vegas metro due to Open sky but from what I understand metro are the only ones using that system,.. I am catching some metro action on the frequency,... 856.2125MHz...? Anyways.. just want a few quick keys so I can turn on my scanner and get right to it,... any help would greatly be appreciated!!!

 

[br0adband]

just bought a bc346xt and want to program it,..I have a membership and tried the software already,.. had my scanner hooked up to laptop and imported hotels and casinos,..lol,.. I know that's a lot!! so I ended up resetting my scanner and now want to start over,..so I guess my question is.... Is there anyone from las vegas here that can show me some cool frequencies to program into my scanner?" I like any police or security chatter,.. and by the way.. I know I cant scan las vegas metro due to Open sky but from what I understand metro are the only ones using that system,.. I am catching some metro action on the frequency,... 856.2125MHz...? Anyways.. just want a few quick keys so I can turn on my scanner and get right to it,... any help would greatly be appreciated!!!

What you're catching is "action" from one of several agencies on the S.N.A.C.C. (Southern Nevada Area Communications Council, a silly bloated name in my opinion). The LVMPD use OpenSky in the 700 MHz range and they are not monitorable, period, by any hardware or software that exists today except OpenSky gear itself.

The S.N.A.C.C. system is the largest one in this region and is almost always busy with some kind of activity; as with all the trunked systems, you only need to program in a few control channels to be able to monitor the whole thing (which is quite large, by the way, with about 350 talkgroups as of today. They'll be changing over to a P25 Phase II system in the next year or so (if I understand the future plans correctly) in the 700 MHz range so you won't be able to monitor them with the 346XT after that happens, but you could always spend $10-20 to get a "cheap USB TV tuner" aka RTL stick and do it that way as long as the digital speech decoders (DSD and DSD+) eventually gain Phase II decoding capabilities.

S.N.A.C.C. covers a lot of stuff itself as intended: North Las Vegas Police and Fire, Henderson Police and Fire, Boulder City Police and Fire, all of Clark County Fire Department activity (fire and EMS dispatch), CC Animal Control, the CC School District, CSN (community college campuses, but those are using P25 digital now), McCarran Airport communications, CC Parks Dept, LV City Marshalls, Detention Center, Water Authority, Paiute Tribal Police, and some other uses - it's the primary thing to monitor if interested in public safety since we can't obviously listen in on the LVMPD. You can, however, monitor a very small amount of LVMPD activity (mostly admin comms and information calls) on the simulcast frequencies they use (several of the old VHF frequencies like 159.150 and 158.970. Not much but it's something I guess.

Link to the S.N.A.C.C. system info is here:

Clark County - Southern Nevada Area Communications Council (SNACC) Trunking System, Clark County, Nevada - Scanner Frequencies

Anyway, that's the largest system in terms of users, next up would be the Nevada Shared Radio System which is used primarily for the Nevada State Police, Department of Transportation, and many other services that are more state-oriented than directly local here in Las Vegas. It's a huge system itself and you never know what you'll hear across that one. Link for the NSRS is here:

Nevada Shared Radio System Trunking System, Various, Multi-State - Scanner Frequencies

And obviously there are businesses galore here in the area, a lot of them using analog trunked comm systems and you can find them at the bottom of this page:

Clark County, Nevada (NV) Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference

There's a ton of non-trunked systems as well but you find those more by looking for other sources of frequencies in thread postings or by asking questions, or the old fashioned way: you scan ranges and note activity then go off to the FCC license database or the RRDB extension of that database and do a search for who owns it and what it's used for. The RRDB doesn't necessarily contain every frequency for every business here in the area, since a lot of people just aren't that concerned with monitoring everything - the biggies are always police and fire/EMS stuff followed by local things when relevant.

Not everything on those trunked listings is entirely accurate of today, however; a lot of businesses are moving towards DMR/MOTOTRBO digital systems, and again while the 346XT cannot directly monitor/decode these systems for voice content, it is possible to monitor them using some SDR hardware and either DSD or DSD+ (digital speech decoder programs) that can do the necessary decoding for you. Pretty sure the 346XT has no discriminator output, nor am I sure if it can be modded to add such a thing - the discriminator tap would provide the pure unfiltered baseband audio that those decoders require as the source material to be decoded to voice comms.

Gotta start somewhere, I'd say. As for any potential software to use for programming or maintaining the data in the scanner, ARC-XT BASIC or PRO would be my recommendation. I've used their software in the past (ARC246 for my trusty old Uniden BC-246T when I owned it) and found the software to be quite functional and useful and well worth the money I paid for it (with lifetime updates if necessary at no charge as well). You may find the Sentinel software just fine for your needs, however (if it works with the 346XT, I'm guessing it does, I don't know for sure since I don't own any physical scanners presently, go figure).

That should get you going... welcome to the club, so to speak. I live in the downtown Las Vegas area myself so, if you have any questions about activity or frequencies and I can help, drop me a PM or head over to the Nevada subforum and make a post there (so this thread doesn't get too far off-topic since it's the Uniden specific subforum).

And thinking of that, this thread will most likely be moved over to the Nevada subforum because it's more accurately described as content related directly to programming and learning frequencies for this particular region than being related to you having a Uniden scanner, so if you go looking for it and can't find it, it's probably been moved.