Oconee County SO

[Barryincharleston]

Anyone monitoring Oconee County SO? If so can you tell me how you do it without the mixed control channel and SO audio on the same channel. I’m monitoring it on UHF 460.2500. Was listening on a HT1000.
I can hear the traffic but it has control channel motorboat sounds mixed in. They are on a DMR repeater.
Do I need to use a PL squelch or tone squelch? Not showing one in the database. Want to monitor when I’m up there visiting family.

Thanks.

 

[brian]

You really need a radio capable of decoding DMR. I don't think there is much analog left on the repeater but perhaps it is running in "Dynamic Mix Mode" or whatever they call it. You can consider a scanner capable of decoding DMR, or a lower cost DMR radio targeted to amateur radio operators like the Tytera MD-380.

Certainly adding a tone (CTCSS or DCS) will limit what you hear to analog traffic with that tone, squelching the DMR signal. You'll have to determine what that tone is.

I show other possible frequencies in use by Oconee Co SD as 460.0875 and 460.6125, both in DMR mode.

 

[Barryincharleston]

Thanks. I’ll give those a try along with PL squelch. Do you know if a XTS3000 will pick that up?
I’ve been trying to learn about DMR by reading on another thread. Thanks.

 

[INDY72]

Thanks. I’ll give those a try along with PL squelch. Do you know if a XTS3000 will pick that up?
I’ve been trying to learn about DMR by reading on another thread. Thanks.

No the XTS series is Analog and P25, You will need an XPR series for MotoTRBO in the Motorola family. Or almost any of the DMR capable CCRs. Such as the suggested Tytera MD 380 or the Baofeng SD-5R like I run. The CCRs are very simple to program, the XPRs a little more complex, and you will need to purchase the MotoTRBO CPS, or find someone that has it ,,,...

 

[brian]

There are many digital radio formats around today, and in general none of them are compatible with each other. For scanner listeners, the most notable of those are P25 (generally used only by Public Safety, Motorola brand is/was "Astro"), DMR (geared toward business users but used by some public safety, Motorola brand is "MotoTRBO) and NXDN (geared toward business users but used by some public safety, not branded by Motorola but the Kenwood brand is "Nexedge"). All of these can and are used by amateur radio enthusiasts.

In the commercial radio world, you won't find many if any radios that support more than one digital platform. In the amateur radio world, you can find some really reasonable and generally decent quality DMR radios. In the scanner world, we're just now beginning to see the flagship scanners support all three of these digital flavors in the same radio.

 

[INDY72]

Kenwood's newest NX5300 family is now multimode, as is the newest iCOM's..(FM/DMR/NXDN/P25). As far as I know, Motorola, Harris, and Tait do not as of yet have this in offerings. But the now discontinued Motorola XTS family(ASTRO) was only designed for Analog/P25, and when they first hit the market, DMR was very rare still, and mainly an European thing. NXDN as far as I know, did not even exist yet. The primary Motorola family of radios for DMR (MotoTRBO their brand name) is the XPR (Flagship is the XPR7000 series). Pretty much everyone offers an DMR capable radio now, and they vary in capability and price from the CCR that can run you 65 to 150 bucks... Up to the 500 to 1000 buck XPRs. Shop around, and make sure you do have some knowledge of how DMR works etc before you dive in and program a HT or Mobile ... The current P25 family from Motorola is the APX (ASTRO-25), the flagship is the APX8000 family, which is all band conventional/trunked/analog/P25 (Trunked Phase I/II) starting at the bargain basement price of about 1000 bucks if your extremely lucky in the used market... New is closer to 3000 bucks. I got lucky and got my APX6000XE for $850.00 ... I got my SD-5R brand new for $80.00 shipped.

Just for general info: NXDN in the EFJ/Kenwood format is NexEDGE, in the iCOM format is iDAS. Motorola, Harris, Tait have no NXDN offerings yet... And another fun fact: There are no CCRs that do NXDN yet.

Though with EFJ/Kenwood buying Tait, there could be NXDN Tait's in the future...

 

[Barryincharleston]

Thanks for the info. I’ll surely look into getting a decent scanner to monitor that.