Little issue with pro-106 and local PD

[snakester]

I'm having a problem with my scanner that honestly isn't really the scanners fault but either way it's getting quite annoying. All of the police stations in the county except for my town have moved to P25. My town had switched over temporarily but because of the layout of the town and the low antenna on the police station, they wound up going back to analog for now.

The problem comes with the fact that some of the radios in other towns cars are misconfigured to broadcast in digital to our dispatch when changed over to our dispatch. Their system handles this properly and the dispatcher and units can hear them; all I get is an earful of digital buzzing. If I set the scanner into search squelch mode, I start losing the first half of the analog conversations.

Is there any way to tell my scanner to listen for both the NAC and the tones? Or am I just pretty much stuck either losing half of the Convo or getting digital buzzing when other towns talk to mine (or a cop knocks his radio into digital by mistake which happens quite a bit)
Thanks.

 

[K9WG]

Does the conventional channel use CTCSS/DCS tones. If so you could set up two channels. One with the conventional channel set to CTCSS/DCS and another with the P25 NAC setting.

 

[W2NJS]

It is possible with some receivers to set them for what we call "mixed mode" which means that they will reproduce in plain English both the P25 and the analog FM transmissions on the same channel. See if there is any reference to mixed mode in your radio's paperwork. The "two-channel" method described above may work at times but I'd be afraid that the P25 "buzzing" might take preference and cause you to lose the other channel's analog FM reception.

 

[snakester]

It is possible with some receivers to set them for what we call "mixed mode" which means that they will reproduce in plain English both the P25 and the analog FM transmissions on the same channel. See if there is any reference to mixed mode in your radio's paperwork. The "two-channel" method described above may work at times but I'd be afraid that the P25 "buzzing" might take preference and cause you to lose the other channel's analog FM reception.

My scanner does have a mixed mode, any squelch setting but it's way too slow at deciding between analog and digital, making me miss a lot of the analog transmission. Being that 95% of the traffic on their channel is analog, this is unfortunately not ideal.

I'm going to try the two channel approach, since that seems to be the most realistic way to do it. They do use CT tones on their analog channel, so hopefully it won't decode the P25 buzzing. Only thing now is it happens pretty rarely so I have to wait for it to happen again before I can get the NAC.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

 

[snakester]

It is possible with some receivers to set them for what we call "mixed mode" which means that they will reproduce in plain English both the P25 and the analog FM transmissions on the same channel. See if there is any reference to mixed mode in your radio's paperwork. The "two-channel" method described above may work at times but I'd be afraid that the P25 "buzzing" might take preference and cause you to lose the other channel's analog FM reception.

My scanner does have a mixed mode, any squelch setting but it's way too slow at deciding between analog and digital, making me miss a lot of the analog transmission. Being that 95% of the traffic on their channel is analog, this is unfortunately not ideal.

I'm going to try the two channel approach, since that seems to be the most realistic way to do it. They do use CT tones on their analog channel, so hopefully it won't decode the P25 buzzing. Only thing now is it happens pretty rarely so I have to wait for it to happen again before I can get the NAC.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

 

[Forts]

Why not just program it without a PL or NAC code for now? That way the radio will have no issues with an analog or digital signal.

 

[snakester]

First off my apologies for the double post. The forums were working weird last night and throwing tons of errors at me.

Why not just program it without a PL or NAC code for now? That way the radio will have no issues with an analog or digital signal.

The problem with that is the scanner isn't particularly good at deciding between analog and digital quickly enough. I lose the first part of the transmission in analog, which is what this department uses the majority of the time. It's causing me to miss unit numbers and stop codes, especially with the way the cops here mash the button and then start talking immediately.

I also tried turning down the deciding time in the advanced menus, but if I turn it down from default then the scanner never switches into digital mode. Looks like I'm gonna be stuck with two channels once I figure out what their NAC is.

 

[OsloViking1975]

What is your county and town and state you are trying to get your Pro 106 to work properly or better at least?

 

[OsloViking1975]

Heres a link that have some NAC 3 digit codes if interested. Federal NAC Codes - The RadioReference Wiki

 

[snakester]

What is your county and town and state you are trying to get your Pro 106 to work properly or better at least?

Exeter NH. most of the time I monitor the county (a lot of the towns around here are small and are dispatched out of the sheriffs office), Newmarket, Hampton, Portsmouth and Exeter PD, along with state PD. I don't monitor any trunked systems, they're all single frequency. All are P25 except Exeter, who from the info I've gotten decided against going digital because it reduced their coverage area. The problem is when an officer from another town tries to speak to them. Since Exeter still has the P25 equipment, and their equipment is completely happy with mixed mode, the towns never bothered to switch exeter back to analog in their radios when they turned off digital. My scanner doesn't handle this very gracefully.

 

[OsloViking1975]

Wow Isee what you mean. Rockingham is all over the place. I see a lot of police departments are P25 but all the fire departments are still FM Mode and some mixed stuff also as you mentioned. I wonder how this affects communications between departments.

 

[snakester]

Wow Isee what you mean. Rockingham is all over the place. I see a lot of police departments are P25 but all the fire departments are still FM Mode and some mixed stuff also as you mentioned. I wonder how this affects communications between departments.

Honestly on their end everything seems to work quite well. I've only seen it fail spectacularly once (Hamptons radios couldnt even hear Exeter once during a funeral procession so every exeter unit had to switch over to digital so he could hear them) and the fire departments with the towns that are P25 either have the communications center setup so they can hear the analog signal from fire rescue or in the case of Hampton (which PD seems to be incapable of hearing analog) the fire trucks have mixed mode radios.

My scanner just doesn't play very nice with this mess of a system.

 

[N1BHH]

"Rock A" and "Rock B' are full time P-25, not mixed mode. "Rock C" on the other hand is mixed mode. It pays to set your Mode to Auto and Squelch Mode to NAC, then the NAC to 117 in one channel and then a second channel with the 136.5 PL. My '106 and '197 both decode rather rapidly so I don't miss much at all. The "problem" you describe sounds like the usual mixed mode "problem" that most people have. Dispatch may be using PL while mobiles are P-25.

 

[snakester]

"Rock A" and "Rock B' are full time P-25, not mixed mode. "Rock C" on the other hand is mixed mode. It pays to set your Mode to Auto and Squelch Mode to NAC, then the NAC to 117 in one channel and then a second channel with the 136.5 PL. My '106 and '197 both decode rather rapidly so I don't miss much at all. The "problem" you describe sounds like the usual mixed mode "problem" that most people have. Dispatch may be using PL while mobiles are P-25.

I have never heard Rock C use anything but P25. It seems like it was intended to be a mobile to mobile repeater and they've started using it at night so all the units around the county can hear and cover for each other especially considering a lot of the small towns go down to one officer, if that at night. There is another sheriff's office channel that deals with a single town that still has analog equipment, but it's not A B or C.

Exeter is completely analog at the moment, however every single radio and their comm center is P25 capable. Their system is designed to be able to deal with mixed mode so they can talk to Rock cars, and can be switched entirely to digital if another unit from another town can't hear their analog broadcasts.

We really are the odd duck out in the county and It gets quite annoying to us scanner guys around here. right now I'm using the two channel approach and although there can still be a bit of a delay if the digital channel catches an analog broadcast first, it's way more bearable than when I have the scanner in mixed mode.