Need help with St. Louis County SLATER Trunked System

[rickgans]

I tried really long and hard to find a thread that addressed my question, but could not find one. I am a long time scanner hobbyist, and have owned numerous conventional scanners. My area went to a multi-county APCO 25 trunked system in the last few months (in fact parts are still coming on line) that combines police, fire, road depts, parks and others into one system. I have downloaded the entire system into my BCD396XT using Radio Reference and ARC-XT software. I can listen to the entire system, but therein lies the problem. I want to create my own groups made up of specific talk groups from the system and I have spent more than 10 hours trying to figure out how to do this. What I am seeking is a similarity to the old "banks" where I would put my local fire dept frequencies in Bank 1, my closest police in Bank 2, next closest police in bank 3, next closest fire depts in Bank 4, etc. In that configuration I could chose to listen close, or a little farther out or even more farther out, just by choosing banks.

I know the talk groups I want to put into my own custom groups, but I cannot figure out if this is possible and if it is, how to do it. Any help is really appreciated. If anyone reading this is in the St. Louis area currently using a BC396XT or BC996XT programmed this way, I will pay you educate me on how to get over this hurdle.

 

[scanman1958]

The quick answer is ..... Yes, you can do all of that. The longer answer(s) could take a lot longer.

First, if needed, you need to separate the north site from the south site. Makes it a little easier to scan them. Then you need to 'create' groups for each agency type you want to monitor. Example, Group 1 could be Central Co Fire and all the agencies that have their own TG such as East Central or U. City Fire. Group 2 could be St Louis County PD and other cities that dispatch themselves (ie; Ballwin, Manchester - Des Peres - Kirkwood etc). So on and so on.

Once you get the hang of it, it is kinda like having banks. You just have to learn to separate systems, sites and groups within the scanner. The biggest problem with the new SLATER system is terrible, garbled reception. Probably because there are so many towers on the system.

I know there are plenty of folks out here that can help. If you want to send me a personal message in the forum you can.

 

[JStemann]

If you set the overall system to "id scan", then create a group with just your closest pd talk groups, then assign that group a quick key. Repeat as necessary. You could have more than one group with the same quick key. Maybe that would save some work in moving things around.

If you run out of room for groups under the first overall system, you can just create a copy of the system and continue on. I had to do this to get the Hamilton county/Cincinnati Ohio system to work. In my case I just split fire/ems and law enforcement into two systems.

Jeff.

 

[rickgans]

Getting Closer But Not There

Thanks. That is sort of what I have done. I let it run overnight last night and logged the results in ARC-XT Pro. I got hits on the talk groups I expected BUT I got even more hits on the ones that should not have come through. Specifically, I have the complete trunk System for St. Louis County as one of my Systems. The other two Systems I have programmed in are "turned off" meaning their numbers are asterisks in the "SO" line near the bottom of the scanner screen (second from the bottom). For the St. Louis County System I have the talk group IDs set up in Groups the way I want them and there are 6 such Groups that are active. The bottom line of the display on the scanner has the first five Groups active, meaning I can see those numbers and the 6th Group shows as an asterisk, meaning it should be turned off and not get any "hits" from the talk groups set up in the 6th Group. That 6th Group that I call "Far Police" has the most talk groups in it which is a total of 13 police departments that I don't want to hear all of the time.

Therein lies the problem. When I look at the log that just ran overnight, there are 24 talkgroups that got hits, all from the St. Louis County System. That is good. But of the 24 talk groups that appear in the overnight log of hits, 13 of them are the police agencies that are in Group 6, but Group 6 was supposed to be turned off. So while it appears I have the scanner programmed the way I want (maybe I don't), I am not getting the result I need. I am using ID scan (when scanning the words ID Scan scroll across the screen in the largest letters in the display). So either the programming is not right or the way in which I am running the scanner is not right.

Help!