Just purchased a new Radio Shack PRO-652. I live in Baxter County and am trying to listen to digital BCSO dispatch freq among lots of others. RR says BCSO is using the AWIN system. I have a vague idea what AWIN is but don't understand terms like trunk system, talk groups, control channels, etc.
If this information is posted somewhere please point me in the right direction.
Help is appreciated.
According to RR Baxter seems to still be mostly using conventional channels. There does appears to be a few (1? Sheriff's Office?) Baxter talkgroups (trunked channels) on the AWIN system but unless this information is incorrect, I wouldn't focus on that for Baxter County. Locals in your area can offer more insight into this....
The info I'm basing this on is here:
Baxter County, Arkansas (AR) Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference
As far as trunked systems, the basic concept is that there are many "shared" frequencies for a system (or a [sub]site of a system). In contrast, legacy "channels" (or dedicated frequencies) are generally assigned to one specific user group (i.e. police dispatch or a fireground channel). These trunked system frequencies are all computer controlled and the data stream for that computer control is known as a control channel. The control channel consumes one of the frequencies and all radios listen to these frequency to know which of the other frequencies to transit and receive on when they are switched to a "talkgroup" (which is just trunked system jargon for a channel). The difference is that the talkgroup is generally assigned to a different frequency each time someone transmits. The computer and the control channel manage all of that and it's mostly transparent to users.
This rapdily becomes a bit more complex because many of today's larger trunked systems operate much like cell phone systems in that the "system" has "sites" that generally cover specific geographic areas. This leads to other considerations where in many cases, it is possible that the users on a given talkgroup may only be heard in a single "site" (area) of the system. There are other considerations but that's probably enough for getting started.
