Onondaga County assistance

[N2RGU]

Hi ya, just registered yesterday, and I'm using the Home Patrol II that I picked up. I imported the file into my favorites, made sure both the monitor and download were on. I am receiving signals via the antenna, but nothing is showing up and I'm not hearing anything. I think I'm missing a step somewhere. Onondaga County is using P25 Phase 2 so this scanner should be picking them up. Any suggestions would be great!

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

Welcome to the RR forums. You're likely facing simulcast distortion depending on where you are in relation to two or more towers on the Onondaga Simulcast. Feel free to try the multipath mitigation steps in the wiki linked below but ultimately you'd be better off with a Uniden SDS100 or SDS200 to track simulcast systems.

Simulcast Distortion - The RadioReference Wiki

wiki.radioreference.com

 

[k2hz]

Simulcast will definitely be a major issue for that scanner. One thing to check in your programming is to only monitor the Onondaga site and not try to scan the entire CNYICC system.

 

[scan1806]

Hi ya, just registered yesterday, and I'm using the Home Patrol II that I picked up. I imported the file into my favorites, made sure both the monitor and download were on. I am receiving signals via the antenna, but nothing is showing up and I'm not hearing anything. I think I'm missing a step somewhere. Onondaga County is using P25 Phase 2 so this scanner should be picking them up. Any suggestions would be great!

IM in bville and will be glad to help you out

 

[scan1806]

Im in bville will be glad to help you out get back to me

 

[scan1806]

Hi ya, just registered yesterday, and I'm using the Home Patrol II that I picked up. I imported the file into my favorites, made sure both the monitor and download were on. I am receiving signals via the antenna, but nothing is showing up and I'm not hearing anything. I think I'm missing a step somewhere. Onondaga County is using P25 Phase 2 so this scanner should be picking them up. Any suggestions would be great!

Im in bville and will help you out get back to me

 

[N2RGU]

Im in bville and will help you out get back to me

Thank you for your offer to help and will be in touch.

 

[scan1806]

Thank you for your offer to help and will be in touch.

I have two of them and they work great

 

[tvengr]

Give this file a try. Save the attached zipped file to your computer and extract. Go the File tab in HomePatrol Sentinel and click on Import from hpe file. Click on New Favorites List and name it: Onondaga Co NY Click on OK. In the Downloads folder, open the extracted file. It will appear as a favorites list in Sentinel.

 

[N2RGU]

Give this file a try. Save the attached zipped file to your computer and extract. Go the File tab in HomePatrol Sentinel and click on Import from hpe file. Click on New Favorites List and name it: Onondaga Co NY Click on OK. In the Downloads folder, open the extracted file. It will appear as a favorites list in Sentinel.

Thank you! Will give it a go!

 

[N2RGU]

Hey guys! I'm giving you an update on my issue receiving the Onondaga County and Syracuse City Police on my HomePatrol II. I took up scan1806's offer to help since he was in town. So I went to see him on Tuesday and what a wonderful gentlemen he is, we got along great! So he was able to download his favorites list which contained what I needed from his Sentinel into my scanner, and my HomePatrol was working!!! I got the departments that I needed and a few others! So I took the unit home, started it right up, and nothing!! Well except for receiving the NY Troop T Police on analog. He called later that night to see how I was doing, and he was just as perplexed as I was, wondering why I wasn't receiving anything. So then, after some quite deducting in my mind, I came up with a theory that I ran out of digital radio coverage. I told him about it, and will get back to him. So I took off in my car, heading towards the nearest radio site to me, with my scanner running, and about 2 to 3 miles down the road, it started receiving audio! So as long as I was within range of that tower, my scanner would be working. When I got home, yep nothing. It is was we call in amateur radio and digital broadcast TV as the "cliff effect". With digital, you'll receive the signals up to point, then BOOM! Nothing! You felled off the cliff! So I called scan1806 back, told him that was it. We were both disappointed over the whole thing, but now we know what the issue is. Simply ran out of digital coverage. I do have a 2 meter ground plane antenna for my amateur radio hobby on the roof, so I could hook up to that and see what happens, or else I think there's an antenna that is much more sensitive than my stock antenna for the HPII that I could buy and use. That's it folks! I'm going to still work on this and see what I could do.

 

[k2hz]

I think what you observed proves the simulcast distotion issue the was referenced early in this thread.

The issue is signal quality, not strength. The scanner can not handle the out of phase signals from multiple towers inherent in a simulcast system. If you are close enough to a tower so that is the only signal it hears, it works fine. If you are between towers, it can't handle the distortion from multiple signals and the reception goes to choppy and then none at all as the errors increase.

So it is a matter of location. If you are in a multiple signal area, an outside antenna will only make it worse. Attempts at a directional antenna usually fail since most Yagi antennas do not have a sharp enought pattern to only receive a single site when surrounded with multiple sites.

So your scanner will not work for this system at your location. Your options are an SDR and P25 decoder software running on your computer or a proper scanner which is either a Uniden SDS or a Unication. Both are expensive and each has some limitations as an all purpose scanner so you should carefully study the issues before you spend the money.

 

[wtp]

with one tower the radio 'hears' 11001010
with another tower in range it now hears "1i1i0o0o1i0o1i0o"
like a small echo and since it can not make sense out of it, it does nothing (goes silent)
you could move to where you can hear it.
get a uniden SDS series radio.
start with a SDR receiver, cheaper, but not a radio or portable.
it is a stick that goes into a computer.
and move the radio around the house, you might find the sweet spot.
here is the simulcast thing again.

Simulcast Distortion - The RadioReference Wiki

wiki.radioreference.com

even try it with the antenna laying down, and in different directions.
and yes i know about the cliff effect, but your radio might even show 5 bars and you get nothing.

 

[DaveNF2G]

I would emphasize the recommendation to get a SDS100 or 200 over the SDR solution. SDRs don't do as well with simulcast, either.

 

[GTR8000]

I would emphasize the recommendation to get a SDS100 or 200 over the SDR solution. SDRs don't do as well with simulcast, either.

"SDR" is a very broad term, but in the sense that you're using it, your logic doesn't make sense as the SDS series is based on the same type of chips that are in most of the common dongles.

Claiming that "SDRs don't do as well with simulcast" is nonsense. It depends entirely on the hardware and software being used, but generally speaking the majority of hardware dongles and commonly used decoding software handle P25 simulcast just fine. I'm decoding multiple simulcast cells with cheap RTL-SDR.com, Nooelec, and FlightAware dongles using SDRTrunk, and have absolutely no issues related to the simulcasting. I also have more expensive hardware like Airspy and SDRPlay, and they perform just as well or better with SDRTrunk than the cheaper solutions.

 

[nacsr]

I live North of Rome, Delta Lake area and recieve Onondaga County loud and clear. I have SDS 200 with an outside antenna mounted about 10'high.

 

[seagravebuff60]

SDRs don't do as well with simulcast, either.

My SDRs do fine with the multiple simulcast systems that I monitor in various locations. Claiming that SDRs don't do well with simulcasts is crazy, considering they have been well-proven to do great with them, and if they didn't, I would stop buying them.

 

[DaveNF2G]

Well, that does not match my experience. I live within the coverage of three P25 simulcast systems and my SDRs with DSDPlus struggle with all of them. I don't know of any SDRs that have the necessary hardware to deal with simulcast correctly.

 

[Whiskey3JMC]

My SDRPlays have no issues with any of the simulcast systems in my region, be it DSDPlus or SDRTrunk

 

[GTR8000]

I don't know of any SDRs that have the necessary hardware to deal with simulcast correctly.

I don't think you understand how SDR works. There is no special/magical "hardware" required beyond what these various devices already have. The software performs direct IQ sampling to demodulate a signal. Doesn't matter if that's basic analog FM or P25 TDMA H-DQPSK simulcast. There are plenty of articles online explaining how all of this works with SDR, I suggest doing some research before jumping to conclusions or making assumptions.

The fact that your experience doesn't match what 99% of others have no trouble with speaks volumes. Perhaps the issue is with your setup. Maybe try software other than DSD+, such as SDRTrunk, and see if the results differ. I know that if everyone else was getting a certain set of results, and I was the outlier having issues with the same thing, I would take a look at my own setup to make sure it wasn't flawed. But hey, you do you.