MPSCS tower ID question

[hanlonmi06]

Im using a GRE PSR 800 and monitoring in wayne and macomb co's.

My question is related to when the scanner locks on to a TGID, ill also see what tower it apparently is seeing the TGID from, at least thats how i understand it to work.

I'll drive from Livonia to Monroe and practically pick everything up via the wayne northville or wayne flatrock towers- or so the scanner tells me. is this in fact whats happening?

another example is at my desk, inside a faraday cage at work, ill get monroe radio traffic coming in on a macomb co tower. are my tower/ID's just messed up?

 

[detroit780]

Frequencies

When you pick up a talk group you can have it display the tower control channel it is coming from. However frequencies are reused. Meaning several towers across the state could use the same control channel and or voice channels if they are far enough away from each other.


The control channel from say Flat Rock could be a normal voice channel in Macomb. So if you're close to the Flat Rock tower and the scanner is searching through your Macomb tower listing and it sees an active control channel It will actually be the control channel for Flat Rock but since the scanner is still in the Macomb system area it will display Macomb instead of Flat Rock.

You can look over the frequencies for the towers in question and see that that may happen.

Im using a GRE PSR 800 and monitoring in wayne and macomb co's.

My question is related to when the scanner locks on to a TGID, ill also see what tower it apparently is seeing the TGID from, at least thats how i understand it to work.

I'll drive from Livonia to Monroe and practically pick everything up via the wayne northville or wayne flatrock towers- or so the scanner tells me. is this in fact whats happening?

another example is at my desk, inside a faraday cage at work, ill get monroe radio traffic coming in on a macomb co tower. are my tower/ID's just messed up?

 

[hanlonmi06]

ahhhhhh.....makes sense

i wasnt thinking in terms of there being a whole slew of VC's. i imported just CC's after the rebanding was done and i wanted to 'rebuild' my radio and somewhat forgot about that aspect. it didn't bother me, so much as confused me. i was still hearing Monroe dispatch no matter what the display said!

i wonder if there is a way to 'program' around that, somehow tag each freq or something....

 

[krokus]

If you are scanning a trunk system, the radio will ignore voice on CC.

The only way to program around that, is segregation of sites to the various scan lists

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[hanlonmi06]

Krokus,

I kind of have that structure. this has been a learning in progress and as part of my lack of understanding, i wasn't sure what cities, departments, ect, i was going to get on what towers, i kind of have a larger group than i probably need. for example, state police, what tower should you program in, A, B, ABC, all of them nearby?

 

[krokus]

That depends on what you are trying to hear. Any tower will only carry radio traffic from any particular talkgroup, if an authorized subscriber is affiliated with that tower.

So if you want to listen to the state police in the Detroit Metro area, pretty much any tower in the tri-county area will carry that traffic. Those towers will not carry the radio traffic from the UP, or Traverse City, etc.

What are you wanting to listen to, and what area(s) are you going to be in?

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[hanlonmi06]

lol, that's the problem, i want to listen too much and over a long enough time line i'm in enough places to want to have a crap ton of things set up. that aside, i live in wayne county, work in monroe, visit macomb jackson, and sanilac counties often enough and like to listen to mostly p/f/med, but also air, govt....

since there is no database that im aware of that links talkgroups to tower (the affiliations), is it a safe assumption to go with the tower location that's in the area will service that area? i know that comes off as a pretty dumb question, but when you get into a system as large as this it can be daunting...i think what confuses me is that state police can and will share wayne county sheriff on the same site.

so, i have a trunked system named wayne county. its county and local 'stuff'. i reduced the number of sites in that system. ive done likewise for a number of "trunked systems" in my GRE, we'll see how it performs.

 

[WA0CBW]

Here is another way to look at it. You program in CC frequencies for a site but you program talk groups for the entire system of many sites. Sites and talk groups may or may not have an association. So you can have many agencies (of different talk groups) sharing the same site. One day you may have a certain agencies talk groups appearing at a specific site but the next day you might not hear any talk groups at that site because there were no agency units "affiliated" with that site. You might say that a site covers an area that many agencies (police, fire, animal control, trash trucks, etc) use.
BB

 

[krokus]

I have as many of the CC and alt - CC as I could fit, in my PSR-500. I then have scan lists set up for the various areas I tend to visit. I have a separate scan list for each of these: Washtenaw, Wayne, Detroit, Macomb, Monroe, Genesse, Saginaw, statewide events, federal, and military. I have a "general" list, which is the catchall for other things, where I keep the metro area MSP entries.

A few agencies are on multiple scan lists, like HVA and Survival Flight.

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[hanlonmi06]

The 800 seems to be able to fit practically everything. i have a very similar set up. i just recently figured out the scan set feature in the 800 where i can set up a set for my daily commute, a set for home, sets for the visiting locations. heck, for the real off beat trip, i have a trunked system just named MPSCS, with every tower and TGID in it. havent used it yet, but i really just wanted to see if you could make a system that large in this radio. turns out ya can.

As i have been relearning the hobby, i just want to make sure im on the right track. ive rebuilt this thing a dozen times as i learn better how the nuts go on the bolts for everything.

Krokus, do all your scan lists reference the same trunked system then? and does that 'trunked system' have all those CC's from multiple sites that you could cram in?

 

[drdispatch]

Also if you click on the tower name in the database, it will give you a generalized map of that tower's coverage area. Terrain and other factors will, of course affect this; but after looking at the coverage areas of a few of the towers in your area, you will begin to see how they overlap.
My philosophy is that I will monitor towers even if they are on the "fringe" of covering a county I am visiting for a couple of reasons: 1) I want to make sure I hear all of that county's traffic. 2) In case one tower goes down, I've already got my eggs distributed, so to speak.

 

[krokus]

Krokus, do all your scan lists reference the same trunked system then? and does that 'trunked system' have all those CC's from multiple sites that you could cram in?

Yes, those are just my MPSCS scan lists. I have them like that, so I can turn off counties that I am not going to be in, in the immediate future. (For instance, if I will only be between Brighton and Mt. Clemens, then I have no reason to scan Monroe or Gennessee.)

The 500 has limits on how many CCs you can have per system. I have the towers in each county, in SE lower peninsula. (As many as I could fit.)

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[hanlonmi06]

Thanks for all the replies. i actually found some old map work i had done eons ago mapping out the tower sites and was really surprised at what it told me. i made this map early on in my re-learning of things, so the info on it has larger impact now. i think i am going to go with not having the sites displayed for the time being, have the towers that are logically within receiving capabilities per usage (home, work, driving) and let it ride.