Longmont PD

[snoopyII]

For all of you up north, is it just me or do Longmont PD's radios seem to be favoring Mead over the Longmont site? Shortly after all of ADCOM disappeared form Thorodin, Longmont PD seemed to become a regular there (Longmont FD has always been reliable on Thorodin). Then, not too long ago there was a thread regarding LPD's radios going in for some programming adjustments. Not long after that, they seemed to become more hit and miss (mostly miss in my opinion) on both the Longmont and Thorodin sites. Anybody else notice this?

 

[ecanderson]

Understand that the 'Longmont' site is down on the water tower at Sunset golf course, and even on the tower, it's below Mead, and Mead is up on a hill on County Line that has a HUGE vista. So it's not at all uncommon for a particular radio to preferentially associate with Mead instead of 'Longmont'. It's always been that way. Longmont can be better if you're in a hole to in the SW area of town.

Have a peek at our 'best guess' propagation maps here (click 'Full resolution' to enlarge):
File:Longmont.jpg - The RadioReference Wiki
File:Mead.jpg - The RadioReference Wiki

 

[nathancarlson]

I use the Longmont CC exclusively while I am at home (in northern Longmont) and don't have many issues in town. If I leave town, I turn on my other control channels, and seem to have a LOT more hits on Bald North than Mead. There are a few spots in town that have very bad DTRS coverage from all of the close sites, like 17th and Pace.

I have the conventional channel in there also, and sometimes will pick up transmissions on that if I don't get a good signal from the Longmont CC.

If the Longmont site has no available voice channels, will another site carry that radios traffic, or will the user get a busy signal?

 

[ecanderson]

17th and Pace is strictly a de-sensing issue due to the cell sites on that corner... especially those on the face of the King Sooper building. It's line of site to Mead, but nearly all consumer radios go into overload there unless you can reduce the RF gain with some sort of attenuation. Similar things can happen near 17th and Main due to the cell site on the bank. There are a number of other similar sites around town that just plain overload the front end of any of my receivers without dropping the gain. Unfortunately, my mobile unit (a Uniden 396XT) doesn't have a quick way of dealing with this off the 'front panel'.

Took me a while to really believe this, but My PRO-197 has an ATT switch, and I found that quite effective -- though it's not something you would want to leave enabled once you got outside of local coverage.

 

[snoopyII]

All valid comments. One would think, that given the number of active LPD radios at any given time, at least ONE of them would affiliated with the Longmont site pretty much all the time, thus bringing the TG to the site. Lately, during my "testing" I've been using the VHF as the "control radio" and having one radio on Longmont, one on Thorodin and one on Mead. VHF and Mead are pretty much chirping at the same time, whereas the Longmont and Thorodin are hit and miss. I'll have to look into the Bald North site though.. that's a good suggestion. I guess if I got really curious, I could tie up a laptop and fire up the Pro96Com for 24 hrs. or so.

 

[snoopyII]

Another thought though too, that's a good point that Mead is higher and has a larger footprint, than Longmont, that the preference settings in the radios were changed to take advantage of this, it conceivably could alleviate what would appear to be coverage issues to the individual user. It would be a simple adjustment especially if LPD had already planned on doing some other tweaking anyway.

 

[ecanderson]

Need to start over on this one:

I took the original comment by the OP ("...do Longmont PD's radios seem to be favoring Mead over the Longmont site?...) to mean that more LPD radios requested association through the Mead site than through the Longmont (Sunset water tower) site. That's a different matter than whether the individual TGs appear on either site, which is not and has not been an issue. The TGs are appearing on both as one would expect.

 

[Spitfire8520]

I've been doing quite a bit of logging of the Longmont site since the thread of them being reprogrammed popped up. I haven't logged Mead or seen enough logs from Mead to be able to say if the radios are indeed favoring Mead over Longmont. The limited logs I have seen says that there's a possibility that radios are not always affiliated with Longmont to allow for the site to carry traffic, especially for the early AM hours.

 

[ecanderson]

Fired up Pro96 on my PRO-107 this morning just to see what I could see. Not sure what to make of this. I've got Longmont and Mead CCs both set up and the entire affiliation list this morning shows 356 (Longmont). It's as though Mead (using CC 853.98750) doesn't exist for the usual LPD 95XX talkgroups. That is certainly outside of my previous experience up here.

I don't normally program the alternate control channels for my PRO-107, but I may add them just to see what happens.

 

[ecanderson]

Never mind on the above. For some (unknown) reason, the PRO-197 at this location will now pick up the Longmont site preferentially ahead of Mead every time (didn't used to do that). Both have excellent decode rates, but for some reason, it's as though the CC on Longmont hits some milliseconds ahead of Mead, and all LPD traffic was received from that site. I dumped the Longmont CC freq out of the mix for LPD, and now see that Mead does indeed carry all of the normal traffic. Granted, for any given day, it may be apples and oranges due to overall LPD traffic, but I'll spend one weekday next week logging LPD traffic only on Longmont, and another logging only on Mead, and compare the results.

That said, I'd swear that in the hours I just logged over the last couple of days, it seems there are more affiliations occurring for LPD radios on Mead than Longmont by a bit.

 

[Steve2003]

You might want to check your multi-site settings for DTRS. There are three options you can do:

Stationary - The scanner will sample all control channels for voice (use this mode if you want to listen to more than one site)

Roam - The scanner will stay locked on the first control channel it receives with a decode threshold greater than or equal to your "Threshold Hi" setting. If the decode rate drops below your "Threshold Lo" setting the scanner will try to find a new control channel.

Off - The scanner will stay locked on the first control channel it receives until the signal is lost.

Here is how I have my DTRS system configured in Win500:

(click to enlarge)

Never mind on the above. For some (unknown) reason, the PRO-197 at this location will now pick up the Longmont site preferentially ahead of Mead every time (didn't used to do that). Both have excellent decode rates, but for some reason, it's as though the CC on Longmont hits some milliseconds ahead of Mead, and all LPD traffic was received from that site. I dumped the Longmont CC freq out of the mix for LPD, and now see that Mead does indeed carry all of the normal traffic. Granted, for any given day, it may be apples and oranges due to overall LPD traffic, but I'll spend one weekday next week logging LPD traffic only on Longmont, and another logging only on Mead, and compare the results.

That said, I'd swear that in the hours I just logged over the last couple of days, it seems there are more affiliations occurring for LPD radios on Mead than Longmont by a bit.

 

[ecanderson]

Well rats ... should have checked that. How the heck did I wind up with that TSYS on "Roam"??? I had it set this way for mobile use (the threshold kept me from poor decoding on some sites as I wandered), but this unit hasn't been used for mobile for quite some time. I'll move it back to "Stationary" and see how it goes with Pro96Com after that.