Hey guys, I really hope someone can help me. I'm new to this whole scanner world but I'm wanting to get a scanner that I can listen to the individual Wichita Police & Sedgwick County channels. Or possibly something where you can play multiple of those channels at once? I consider myself pretty tech savy, but honestly just starting to look into all of this & exactly what scanner I need is making me pretty overwhelmed.. 😕 Does anyone know of a pretty cheap scanner that will work with those channels? It doesn't need to be preprogrammed at all. I can do that.
Unfortunately 'cheap' and 'capable of handling Simulcast' don't go together, with the exception of using a PC and an SDR dongle, as
N1GAW mentioned
above.
As
tvengr mentioned,
Sedgwick County is on a simulcast system. Here's a map of the tower sites:
See this Wiki page for a more detailed description of the issues with simulcast:
Simulcast digital distortion - The RadioReference Wiki
The problem is that all of the system's simulcast towers are transmitting the exact same radio traffic, on the same frequency as all the others, at the same time. Your distance from the various towers means that their signals will arrive at your location (and scanner) with just enough variance in time that the scanner cannot properly decode the transmissions.
Simulcast issues are very location specific. If you are very close (say a quarter mile or so) of a tower, the strong signals might drown out the out of sync signals from other locations. Or, you might find that a given scanner will work at a specific spot in your house. Metal siding, insulation in the walls that is foil-backed, neighboring houses, tall buildings, or hills might reduce signal strength from conflicting sites & even a scanner not really designed for simulcast might work. But, if you move the radio to a different part of the house, or take it with you in your car or truck, all bets are off. You may get no reception, or it might be so garbled much of the time that you can't really understand what was being said.
Besides the SDS100 or SDS200 Uniden scanners, which are designed to work in simulcast areas (and aren't cheap), and the SDR dongle/PC method, which can be cheap but not really portable), your other options would include one of the Unication pagers, and the
BlueTail receiver. While I do not own either of these, multiple comments from others indicate that these do work effectively when dealing with simulcast problems. The Unication pager is not a true scanner. You are limited to one site in a single system, with a limited number of talkgroups that can be monitored at one time. You can program more than one site, system, and additional talkgroups, but you cannot scan all of them at the same time. While the Blue Tail receiver does not have all the functionality of a scanner such as the SDS series, it can be programmed for more than one system, and is considerably less expensive than an SDS100..
