Montgomery County Question

[hiegtx]

Russel, I tried to send this to you via a PM, but my PM's never go through, I have contacted RR about this, and it took them over a week to respond with "Everything appears to be acting correctly on your account" but when I send it as a PM, as I just did again today, it doesn't show up in the sent folder, it just says message sent, and gives me no record of the message ever being sent (SENT FOLDER)
So I will post it here as the PM system is completely unreliable.

So I was listening to my scanner today, (Saturday 3/14/2015) at approximately 1455 CST On TxWARN P25 TG1476 - NFM Montgomery County Constables Office, there was and continues to be traffic, people are talking, and I realize this may be insignificant to most people, but it means that the programming is correct.

So here's yet another question, If I wanted to set up a favorites list, so that I could effectively break down the FL by each department, how would I go about doing that?

What seems to confuse the hell out of me, is the Simulcast frequencies, in Sentinel they are nothing more than a list of frequencies, a lot like the Taminia group just frequencies. When I try to create a FL with just the MCCO radios, so that all it scans is that talk group, I get static and a message that reads NOTHING TO SCAN which means I am missing something, control channels maybe? I don't know, and is why I am not understanding what I am doing.

Any Thoughts would be appreciated.....

Gary

For your Private Messages, in order for it to save a copy in your "Sent" folder, that needs to be 'turned on'.

Way up at the top of the Forums page, one of the options on the Menu bar is 'User CP'.
Select that.
Then, on the left side in about the middle of all the various categories, you'll see "Settings and Options".
In that category, click "Edit Options".
That brings up a page with various option settings.
Under Messaging and Notification, you'll see the options for Private Messaging.
Make sure it is enabled. The very last option under the Private Messaging is a check box to Save a copy of sent messages in my Sent Items folder by default.

As far breaking the list down into Departments to separate them out, you can certainly do that in Sentinel. That's what I did with this system in my area:
Fort Worth Regional Radio System Trunking System, Tarrant, Johnson Counties, Texas - Scanner Frequencies

While not nearly as large a system as TxWARN P25, it is the largest (at this point) in the DFW area. Several different systems were combined into this one as various layers when they changed from analog to digital.

For example: Look at the group of talkgroups under Northeast Tarrant. These cities were formerly on the Northeast Tarrant County (NETCO) analog system. I broke those talkgroups out into a separate system (my preference), along with the frequencies for 'Layer 3', the simulcast for those TGID's. I further split the talkgroups up into their individual cities, categorizing those into departs for Fire, Police, and 'Misc' (that collected all the non-Public Safety users, such as utilities, Public Works, etc).

If you like, I can walk you through that with some screen shots from Sentinel. PM me your email address, along with a rough idea of what you're trying to do. I can take a look at it this evening or perhaps tomorrow afternoon.

For your 'nothing to scan', I'm guessing that while you split out the talkgroups of interest to you, you did not include the tower site that their radio traffic is carried on.

 

[GShock75]

ASK and YE SHALL KNOW

A lot of agencies are using the MDT's for routine dispatch of calls, cutting the voice traffic by a great deal. As I noted, the DPS units in the immediate Dallas area are rarely heard at all, except in case of a chase or an emergency.

While some agencies do use cellphones or something like Nextel (in the Dallas area, TxDOT and NTTA, the toll road authority, both do), that generally is not the case with law enforcement agencies. They likely would not be using a voice channel on the same frequencies as their MDT's.

If you are hearing at least some Montgomery County constable activity, on the channels that are not listed as encrypted, but you're not hearing the traffic stops very close by, my guess would still be that either they are using an encrypted channel (which your scanner will skip), or handling that through the MDT's.

You might try using Close Call on the scanner, and see if it grabs anything on the close by activity. If encrypted, the scanner may stop very briefly, indicating a Close Call hit, then move on once it determines encryption is in use (if it is, you may see an 'ENC' briefly appear in the display).

So I saw this afternoon, at approximately 1630 hours, that outside my dining room window, out at the edge of my driveway, were not one but two separate Constable vehicles, a nice lady from Precinct 2 and our great good ole guy from Precinct 5 having a discussion, I used going out to get the mail as an excuse, not that they aren't friendly, I just didn't want to make it look like I was stalking them to arrive, lol.
Anyhow, after talking to them, I asked the question "I really hope I don't get arrested for asking this, but, I was curious since I had just bought and got involved in the scanner community, if they in fact did still use their radios for communications" They both laughed and then the gentleman told me that they do the majority of their communications go through the computer, as well told me I probably wouldn't hear anything as they are on a trunked system" just as you guys had mentioned, however he did say "BUT! If I do use the radio, you better bring help, and then laughed"
I have to say I really appreciate these people, their cander, and professionalism, but most of all they are just regular people with a job to do, and a group of folks that I admire for this.

Anyhow, I just wanted to confirm it for you guys, that way if someone asks in the future, we already have the answers.

Gary

 

[cmdcomm]

You can listen to all law enforcement in the county on the Txwarn system on the Mont Co simulcast site. There are 5 main channels. Sheriff and Constable can be heard all day long and all calls are dispatched on the radio.

 

[GShock75]

Can you actually tell which departments are which? I have my 536 set up to identify which department is which by the color of the ring, it is quite feasible that they are patched through MCSO, but as far as exclusive transmit and receive they rarely, use their own channels, at least in my experience.

 

[motorola_otaku]

What he means is, all of the constable precincts and small municipal PDs are dispatched on the MCSO dispatch channels. The constable channels you're trying to listen to are just back channels.

 

[GShock75]

Aww, gotcha, that makes more sense, thank you.

 

[bpckty1]

If there are interference problems, because of the simulcast, if you are in west Montgomery County you can try the Tomball site. I use it from SW Harris County when monitoring Tomball/HCCO-4, and the Montgomery area.