Obtaining ProVoice radios

[mlinthicum]

Sorry for the stupidity of this question, but is it possible to obtain and monitor a ProVoice system, without going through the radio service who installed the system?

The City of Springfield (Ohio), where I live, went ProVoice a couple of years ago, and I really miss monitoring the FD. I also operate an incident notification system, and we'd really like to be able to hear whats going on, so we could pass the info along to our subscribers.

Thanks in advance for any information.

 

[mam1081]

It is possible. Probably not very legal, but it's possible (and expensive). You'd have to find someone selling a provoice EDACS radio (800 MHz). You'd have to find someone that has, or buy, the programming equipment (software and cable). Finally, you'd have to program it all in the radio. The stuff on the RR database looks to be good enough to use to program the radio.

The radios are fairly easy to find. I've seen them come up on this board from time to time. Expect to pay ~600-1500 for a "Option 29" radio. You should read up the first board post on EDACS systems. There is an excellent list of what all the options are for a radio. Option 29 is ProVoice. AEGIS is another, older digital/secure voice format. I doubt your city uses that with ProVoice, but one never knows. You will not be able to listen to any encrypted traffic with just a provoice radio - only digital. If I were you, I would program it so transmit and affiliation were disabled, and then your radio would just be a glorified scanner (sounded like this is what you wanted).

Hope that helped.

 

[Rescue1]

Sounds like it would work,but wasn't there an update with the software in the radios and the controller a while back that now requires some type of system key to monitior it?? I could be wrong but I thought I read it somewhere.....

 

[mam1081]

If it's an ESK system, yes. If your scanner can trunk it, you can program a EDACS radio to it without a key. As long as a scanner can trunk it (might not hear anything because of the ProVoice), the system is not using ESK. You are out of luck if it has ESK, unless you manually trunked the system (program all of the frequencies in your EDACS ProVoice radio, and manually turn the knob (or scan) to activity).

 

[Rescue1]

Is there any way to put a key into the radio like there is the Motorola??Is it a similiar process??thanks for the help...

 

[mlinthicum]

Thanks for the information. I thought I had read somewhere, that an EDACS radio could be programmed, so that the system didn't see it, and I just wanted to see if it was worth going down that path.

 

[FireMan16]

there is pro voice radios on EBAY