Longmont Area, Fire and EMS scanning

[Moosemedic]

I see Longmont, as well as Mountain View Fire are listed with both VHF Freq's and DTRS talkgroups

Which is the best way to monitor them?
I've got a new BCD396XT and I"m still learning - in spite of the 273 page manual ;-)

I'm hearing Longmont POLICE just fine on their VHF frequencies but I have yet to hear any Fire or EMS traffic.

When I look at the VHF page in the database it says they're on DTRS
When I go the Boulder County section for the DTRS it states that they're still on VHF
??????

 

[jimmnn]

I see Longmont, as well as Mountain View Fire are listed with both VHF Freq's and DTRS talkgroups

Which is the best way to monitor them?
I've got a new BCD396XT and I"m still learning - in spite of the 273 page manual ;-)

I'm hearing Longmont POLICE just fine on their VHF frequencies but I have yet to hear any Fire or EMS traffic.

When I look at the VHF page in the database it says they're on DTRS
When I go the Boulder County section for the DTRS it states that they're still on VHF
??????

Longmont is DTRS, Mountain View is DTRS for the Weld County portion of there dist and VHF for the Boulder County portion.

Jim<

 

[ecanderson]

I see Longmont, as well as Mountain View Fire are listed with both VHF Freq's and DTRS talkgroups

Which is the best way to monitor them?
I've got a new BCD396XT and I"m still learning - in spite of the 273 page manual ;-)

I'm hearing Longmont POLICE just fine on their VHF frequencies but I have yet to hear any Fire or EMS traffic.

When I look at the VHF page in the database it says they're on DTRS
When I go the Boulder County section for the DTRS it states that they're still on VHF
??????

Longmont is simulcasting PD traffic on DTRS/VHF. I also have a 396XT, running the audio through the vehicle's audio system, and find that the VHF audio is crisper in my case. You have to put up with the old squelch noise, but on the whole, it sounds cleaner. That's because for some reason, the 396XT equalization for DTRS seems to add a lot of low end, and seems to trim the high end -- exactly the opposite of what you'd want for best speech recognition. Longmont's own EQ seems to exacerbate this a bit, too.

Longmont FD seems to be all moved to DTRS now without any exceptions I've noted in a very long time.

Boulder County is and will remain primarily a VHF system due to propagation issues in the area they serve, simulcasting VHF off 3 different towers. They have DTRS capability for inter-ops, but in-house, it's very much a VHF system. They didn't bite (and it was a good thing for them) once they saw test data that said DTRS would be a train wreck for them in the mountains.