Need help listening to a trunked network

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jack90720

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So im pretty new to scanning and i bought my first scanner, which is a Uniden BCD325P2, i needed this one for the purposed to scanning the fire radio channels where i live which is orange county, CA.
This place uses a mega trunked network, with a million or so channels. I know because i use it at work which also happens to be in fire, but my father wants a scanner so he can listen to me when im at work.

The system is a Motorola II Smartzone, https://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?sid=201 is the network.

Im trying to figure out how i can just tune into several, but not nearly all of them, and only listen to one at a time.

For example, the way it works is here we have groups 1 through 7, and almost each one has channels Alpha through Oscar.

is there a way to for me to only tune into, say 4Delta, and only hear all the traffic coming through that channel? sorry im preeetty new to this, i have a good understanding about how Trunking networks work, but im not entirely sure it can work the way im thinking about it, because the scanner itself doesnt have its own system ID, and just piggybacking on another ID is unreliable because we change channels at work all the time, so the ID might no longer be transmitting on the TG im listening to. Am thinking about this right, or do i have it all wrong?

I feel like the answer is simple and it's staring me right in the face, but i can't see it, please help D:
 

jack90720

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Additionally, I used freeSCAN to upload the control frequencies and all the talk groups onto the scanner, and made 7 of my own GRP's to copy and paste the channels from the groups that freescan gave, me, for the sake of organization to kinda of how it looks at work so im not so confused as to where my specific channels are. there's a ton of Sites on the radioreference table for orange county's "CCCS"(system name). From what im seeing, most of the controlling for my TG's are coming from the Countywide site. so do i really need all the other ones? or can i delete these off of my freescan system table? because it scans all of them instead of just my talk groups(or at least it does when i want to scan all of my talk groups)
 

jack90720

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***UPDATE***

Well, i think I've figured it out for the most part. I actually did have it right already. What i'm doing right now seems to work.
What i've done is, for starters, all of the control site's that showed up EXCEPT "countywide" i locked out and that seems to have cleaned up the speed of how i get it working, i haven't really noticed a negative affect of doing that yet, if any of you know if this is actually causing me or going to cause me problems, please let me know.
So with that done, now it only ID Scan's(i changed it from ID searching, because ID searching seemed to cause transmissions, that scanning picked up, to cut off prematurely and make scanning continue).
and when it ID scans something it grabs a system ID and stops on one of the talk groups, i Hold it. which then it seems i can scroll through all the talkgroups and hear all of them.

Now the biggest problem i seem to be running into is on the initial startup of the scanner. when it first begins scanning the Countywide site and i press hold, if nothing was transmitting it just stops on one of the frequencies in the site frequency list and all i hear is a bunch of noise but sometimes i get an ID and sometimes i don't and im not sure what's happening. I can't reliably just tune to a TG every time i turn the scanner on and just listen. And I want to be able to, but I'm still not sure how.

If my probably-horrible description doesn't suffice, I can probably make a video example of what i'm talking about.

like i said, im really new to this, still reading everything, and tinkering around

any advice helps, thanks.
 

dave3825

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Is dad scanning from home or in a vehicle? If from home, and if your talk groups of interest are all on "site Countywide" you should be able to eliminate any and all sites that are too far to actually receive and or do not broadcast your talk groups of interest. I never have sites that I cant receive in a system that I only use at home.. For travel, I use gps.
 
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jack90720

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Is dad scanning from home or in a vehicle? If from home, and if your talk groups of interest are all on "site Countywide" you should be able to eliminate any and all sites that are too far to actually receive and or do not broadcast your talk groups of interest. I never have sites that I cant receive in a system that I only use at home.. For travel, I use gps.

What's the GPS let you do?
 

dave3825

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I have a bcd436hp. It will do location scanning via a gps puck. So all sites and talkgroup categories have gps info listed in the database and that gets downloaded to the scanner. So by using the location feature, the gps knows exactly where the scanner is and can load only systems within a geographical range the user can set...
 
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