Patch reception BCD396XT - Is this a bug?

[joescanner]

While doing some random monitoring tonight, I kept hearing Agency A, a local agency whose talkgroups I almost always have locked out (and yes, I confirmed that they were still locked out tonight) popping up on a patched talkgroup that can't exist (because of the configuration of the system).

Agency A did have their talkgroup involved in a patch, but not with Agency B (and they were showing up on Agency B's patched talkgroup - which was also patched with another talkgroup but not with Agency A).

The radio was in ID SEARCH mode.

The patched talkgroups do not all appear on either Agency A's or Agency B's consoles.

Data stream monitoring reveals that there were in fact two patches, involving both agency's on two of their own agency-specific talkgroups but no cross-agency patch was in place.

This was consistent for about an hour or so.

I finally power cycled the radio and Agency A quit being received on Agency B's patched talkgroup.

I do have binary OSW streams available, and can provide additional information outside of the forum, if anyone wants to investigate.

 

[DaveIN]

It does sound like a bug the way you describe it, but what is the configuration of the system that makes it unusual than other systems? In the ID Search mode you should capture all patch supergroups (as well as iCalls), but your mention that agency A and B should not be patched. Were you monitoring the data with UniTrunker, and were the same talkgroups and patch ID's displayed the same as the display of the XT (of course alternating on the XT display)? Patches are temporary selections on the user consoles I believe only creating the actual ID in the OSW for the radios to talk to each other for a short time period then expire.

I'm not sure why cycling the power would change how the radio sees the patch supergroup, but if the data was captured incorrectly at the start of the patch, due to a drop in reception or interference at the time the patch was initiated, then cycling the power could have reset the display and the next OSW reported the correct patched talkgroups.

To be sure it's a bug, I believe you would need to see it happen again.

 

[slicerwizard]

I suspect he was monitoring with TRUNK88.

So a Uniden scanner did something strange / buggy? I'm shocked!

Joe, if you email me what you've got, I'll render an opinion.

 

[joescanner]

I suspect he was monitoring with TRUNK88.

You know me too well. lol.

So a Uniden scanner did something strange / buggy? I'm shocked!

I'm not so (sarcasm noted) shocked that the scanner did something strange, more curious about what triggered the behavior, so that maybe they can find the issue and correct it.


To DaveIN: I have contacts that confirmed that there was no cross-agency patch in place at any time. There were, and I don't dispute this, three active patches each including two talkgroups. I started looking at the binary form of the TG IDs to see if there was any way that a TGID could have been misinterpreted, but the bit patterns are all far enough apart that well, I just don't see how it could have been a bit error.

joe