Philadelphia FD & BCT396D

[w2lie]

Question for all of you living in or scanning the Philadelphia system.
I recently programmed up a radio for someone who lives down in your area. I live on Long Island and I am unable to troubleshoot.

I got a call today saying that the scanner isn't stopping for any traffic. When I had them put the radio into ID SEARCH mode, he says there was no change.

I programmed the site 001 shown here: http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?sid=833 as an APCO-25 system. I loaded all the frequencies into the radio since they had the room in there, and didn't feel like I needed to restrict the radio to only scan the control channels.

I have only programmed in the Fire Dispatch and EMS dispatch talk groups into their radio. The radio is receiving other conventional frequencies, but not the Philadelphia FD system.

They are located in the city limits....
Can anyone give any suggestions? Should I have programmed the system as a Motorola System II instead of APCO-25?

Thanks for the help

 

[pacman67]

I live just outside of Philadelphia and I had to program my Radio Shack PRO-197 digital desktop scanner as Motorola 800/900 for it to work on both Philadelphia police and fire/EMS. I tried APCO-25 and received nothing.

 

[DELCOLHFC]

W2lie, I don't have a 396 but I have my 996 programmed as a Moto Type 2 800MHz Standard and it works well on the system.

 

[ocguard]

Philly's system is a mixed-mode (3600 baud CC) system, so it must be programmed as a Moto Type II 800 Standard system. The Motorola P-25 setting is for P25 exclusive (9600bps CC) systems. Unfortunately, there is no easy was to re-program the system type from the scanner's front end or from Uniden UASD -- you'll need to completely reprogram the system. This is one nice feature that bctool does well.

 

[nosoup4u]

Also, the default digital settings won't work well. You will have to adjust those as well.

 

[w2lie]

nosoup - what did you have to adjust them to?

Seeing the info on the above link is what did me in..
System Name: Philadelphia
Location: Philadelphia, PA
County: Philadelphia
System Type: Motorola Type II SmartZone
System Voice: APCO-25 Common Air Interface Exclusive

Seeing the APCO-25 in there made me make a bad decision! (but no excuses - the Type II info was right there also!)

I should have the radio back this week to reprogram. Hopefully this time I can send back a working rig.