MARCS Dist. 4 question...

[Nick0207]

Hello All,

I was curious and started to stream live audio via Radio Reference of the OSP districts 3 and 10. There seemed to be considerably more traffic than I pick up at home. I monitor district 4 and 10 on a BCD996XT, but was wondering if there are transmissions going on that I am unable to hear... Is there a way to enhance my listening capabilities? I programmed every site in the counties in Dist. 4 and the appropriate talk groups from FreeScan. Is that basically all I will need? And is there a way to listen to car-to-car traffic?

Thanks!

 

[mtindor]

Hello All,

I was curious and started to stream live audio via Radio Reference of the OSP districts 3 and 10. There seemed to be considerably more traffic than I pick up at home. I monitor district 4 and 10 on a BCD996XT, but was wondering if there are transmissions going on that I am unable to hear... Is there a way to enhance my listening capabilities? I programmed every site in the counties in Dist. 4 and the appropriate talk groups from FreeScan. Is that basically all I will need? And is there a way to listen to car-to-car traffic?

Thanks!

On MARCS, you'll only hear car-to-car traffic if your scanner is tuned to the tower site that one of the conversing officers is affiliated. If your scanner is scanning site A and Car 1 is associated with site B and Car 2 is associated with site C, you won't hear that traffic. OF course, that's pretty much the same kind of thing for dispatch -- If you are monitoring tower A, and there are no units associated with tower A using the particular talkgroup you want to hear, you won't hear it.

If you are programming in "every site in the counties in District 4", I might suggest that you make sure you can reliably receive the control channel on each one of those sites. If you can't reliably receive a site, it doesn't make sense to add it into your list of sites to scan since it'll just take up needless time to scan the weak CC and you won't be able to decode it well anyway.

Also, keep in mind that hte more sites you add in for scanning, the longer it takes to get through all the sites and back to the original site for scanning. It takes 1-2 seconds per sight to check the control channel for a site to see if there are any active talkgroups.

So keep the list of sites you scan as limited as you can while still covering the area that you can reliably monitor.

Mike