Mobile County Communications District - 800 MHz active from Mt. Vernon?

TomServo

Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2007
Messages
132
Location
Foley, AL
While fiddling around with one of my antennas late this evening, I came across a fairly strong control channel on 854.2875 MHz. It appears to be for the MCCD system but it's not listed on the RR DB yet. The only entry I could find anywhere on the gulf coast for the frequency was for WRMT222 in Mount Vernon.

I'm in central Baldwin County so reception like this, especially on 800 MHz where I don't even hear some of the 800 MHz AIRS sites, is a bit weird but I guess there was something just right to make it work for about a half an hour. In that time I only heard one call in the clear, and it was a patch call between talkgroups 65101 and 32772, of which neither are listed on the MCCD site but were clearly police comms of some sort. SDRtrunk did eventually pull site data indicating this was site 1, and neighbor sites were listed as 2, 3 and 10, which matches what's on the MCCD listing so far.

The only other talkgroup with activity before the connection died was an encrypted TG of 1107, but again it's not listed on the MCCD page.

I don't know if this is enough to submit to the DB admin so I'd like to see if anyone else is hearing this first.

To add to the mystery I did have one other unknown control channel, 855.1875 but I didn't find an active entry for it anywhere on the gulf coast, so no idea what it could be. It never gave me any network information or calls that I could use to trace the source and it was gone after about 10 minutes.
 

Wilrobnson

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Jun 19, 2002
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Object-oriented
Neither of those look familiar. Were you able to glean a SysID at all?

Remember too that the tropospheric ducting the past few days has been incredible and is forecast to intensify through the end of the weekend.
 

sadave

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Joined
Feb 3, 2013
Messages
147
Location
Foley, AL
Something happens sometimes on the system when an AIRS agency piggybacks on MCCD. I have encountered TGs in the 65xxx range popping up on MCCD when, in fact, they are often a department operating on AIRS. In my unidentified/unconfirmed list are 65185 (which was Dothan PD) and unknown TGs 65111 and 65134. When I posed these findings a few years ago, another enthusiast said the MCCD system generated the 65xxx TGs as itinerant. Sounded reasonable to me.

Unless something has changed recently, none of the AIRS sites listed in the RRDB in Mobile County are active.

Though I don't have TG 1107 identified, I have several others in the 11xx series in my unidentified list for MCCD. Saraland FD is on 1102, 1103, and 1104.

Unfortunately, I cannot monitor MCCD from home and only get it when closer to Mobile County in the car.
 

TomServo

Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2007
Messages
132
Location
Foley, AL
Neither of those look familiar. Were you able to glean a SysID at all?

Remember too that the tropospheric ducting the past few days has been incredible and is forecast to intensify through the end of the weekend.

Yes, I was able to get some data on both the suspected MCCD and other mystery system.

The first one where I heard the police activity:

WACN: 6000052
System: 10
LRA: 1

By the time I thought to screenshot the details page in the app the system had stopped decoding.

The second mystery site has more info but it seems either corrupted or partial:

Network:

WACN: 92463 [599139]
System: 00A [10]
NAC: 05D [213]
LRA: D5 [213]


Current Site:
Primary control channel: 1-335
Secondary control channels: 1-551, 1-579
Current data channel: 0-0

Neighbor Sites and Frequency Bands: unknown

This second site is still decoding even during the day in Baldwin County, much to my surprise, but I'm still not hearing anything or seeing any data.
 

TomServo

Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2007
Messages
132
Location
Foley, AL
*smacks forehead*

Well ain't that something! When I was going through the various trunked pages in the database trying to find matching numbers, I purposely skipped the FPL entry because I'd plugged both Ensley and Molino sites into my app and had not ever heard anything. I'll make a mental note of it for the next time we get severe weather, maybe I'll actually hear traffic.

As for the first site, I've checked a few times overnight when I would expect conditions to be more favorable but so far haven't heard a thing again.
 
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