Morrison County ROAM on ARMER

[shanneken]

Recently picked up a PRO 197 scanner from the local RadioShack; used one of the trial downloads in the ARC 500 software to pick up the "new" frequencies that are a couple years old now I guess.

Anyways, the problem that I've been having is that I just took everything from Morrison County, checked the sites that were close (Flensberg, Freedhem, Royalton and Kimball were the four that I have) and clicked on Morrison county for the frequencies that are in the area.

Been working great for the Sheriff's office/Dispatch and all that, but I hear the cars saying they're going to the roam channels and I lose everything that they're talking about. I double checked and my computer says that they aren't locked out and are on the scanner but I'm missing something.

Do I have a setting wrong or is there a different frequency out there that I missed/not in the database?

 

[northwoodsradio]

43002 is Morrison county roam. Make you have all the control channels for each site programmed into the scanner, which on the database are labeled as the red ones. Another key thing to do is keep a talkgroup in the wildcard mode, this way you will pickup all traffic for Morrison county and anything else on there. Since alot of different Talkgroups haven't been found for them yet, it's always a good option.

 

[davef3138]

It could very well be that they're simply not talking once they switch to roam.

I'll often hear units in my county saying that they're leaving the county and switching to roam, and I indeed see it in the control channel monitoring. But it's rare that they actually talk over it. If they do it's usually very brief, basically when they're arriving at or leaving their destination.

The intent of the roaming talkgroups is for the counties to have a talkgroup with statewide permission (allowed to affiliate to any site) as a way for a unit to talk to their dispatch when out of the county. Normally, a given county's talkgroups are typically allowed on sites within their county and neighboring sites.

If heavily used talkgroups were allowed statewide (for example, law mains) a site could quickly be overrun with distant traffic resulting in busies and/or missed traffic by users. For example, if there was a law enforcement conference at an outstate resort and officers from around the state were there.

-Dave

 

[ThinBlueLine22]

The ROAM talkgroups are used to reach back to dispatch when outside of their home area, hence the statewide access of the talkgroup.

When the transient unit calls back from home, the audio is never transmitted out on the local sites unless another radio is affiliated to the ROAM talkgroup on one of the home sites.

Its a little difficult for me to explain, but you will probably never hear the ROAM talkgroups on the home sites except as they leave or come back to the home area.

 

[JT-112]

If heavily used talkgroups were allowed statewide (for example, law mains) a site could quickly be overrun with distant traffic resulting in busies and/or missed traffic by users. For example, if there was a law enforcement conference at an outstate resort and officers from around the state were there.

This isn't a theoretical thing - there were fairly serious overloading problems during the bridge collapse.

The post-mortem on how the radio system fared during that incident is pretty good reading.

Long story made short, units all over the area tuned to the channels in use to hear what was going on, blocking other traffic.

 

[shanneken]

Thank you for all the information guys, looks like it's working as intended as I double checked and I do have the 43002 code in my scanner. I double clicked on the frequencies in the ARC500 software and the control frequencies were all there (blue and red on the site here).

Just as to make sure I understand the situation right, Morrison ROAM only applies if a Morrison sheriff/deputy car heads to a neighboring county and needs to get in touch with Morrison Dispatch. But if somebody from, say, Stearns county comes in they would being using Stearns Roam to talk, or would they use our roam to basically bridge back to Stearns?

 

[davef3138]

Stearns would use their own roam. You should be able to hear them at that point because their radio will pull that talkgroup's audio to your site.


-Dave

Thank you for all the information guys, looks like it's working as intended as I double checked and I do have the 43002 code in my scanner. I double clicked on the frequencies in the ARC500 software and the control frequencies were all there (blue and red on the site here).

Just as to make sure I understand the situation right, Morrison ROAM only applies if a Morrison sheriff/deputy car heads to a neighboring county and needs to get in touch with Morrison Dispatch. But if somebody from, say, Stearns county comes in they would being using Stearns Roam to talk, or would they use our roam to basically bridge back to Stearns?

 

[shanneken]

Thank you for all your help and clarification, I know a bit better what's going on at least!