Pickens County Palmetto 800

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W1CRN

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So I see that there are talkgroups for pickens county and as far as I was aware the county never went with it as it was too expensive. I now see that in RR that " Pickens County Fire Departments and EMS have talkgroups on the Palmetto 800 digital trunked radio system " I have not heard any traffic on them. are any of these TGs active or will they be active? What departments will be on them?
 

brian

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I received a submission that simply stated that Pickens County has talkgroups on the Palmetto 800 system. That's true, so I added the notes in the RR database to be consistent with other agencies that have assigned talkgroups.

The submission didn't indicate that the talkgroups were regularly used, and I haven't heard any reports that they are. Which is why I phrased the note in the database the way I did. However, I believe there is an agency associated with Clemson Univ that does use Palmetto 800, and a new site was installed in Clemson recently. That may be an indication that more Palmetto 800 use may occur in the near future. I'd recommend that hobbyists in Pickens County keep Palmetto 800 in their scanning list and monitor for possible increased use.
 

N4DJC

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I have Pickens and the Clemson Palmetto 800 sites programmed. I logged about ten hours Saturday without a hit.
 

brian

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You should hear agencies like SCHP and SCDNR on those sites. I assume you mean that you didn't log a hit on any of the listed Pickens County talkgroups. That would pretty much confirm that Pickens County agencies are still using VHF and UHF conventional channels for now.
 

DanRollman

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You should hear agencies like SCHP and SCDNR on those sites. I assume you mean that you didn't log a hit on any of the listed Pickens County talkgroups. That would pretty much confirm that Pickens County agencies are still using VHF and UHF conventional channels for now.

At least when I was there in June, I heard SCDNR on the new Clemson tower. I did not hear any SCHP activity on it. I assumed the SCHP radios hadn't yet been reprogrammed to add it into the Site list. Someday if we ever have large crowds at college football games again, that will be a great near-site to take a load off other sites for activity that doesn't need broader coverage.
 

N4DJC

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You should hear agencies like SCHP and SCDNR on those sites. I assume you mean that you didn't log a hit on any of the listed Pickens County talkgroups. That would pretty much confirm that Pickens County agencies are still using VHF and UHF conventional channels for now.

Being opening day of dove season I heard a bit of very generic DNR traffic, just not on those sites. I imagine specific DNR enforcement traffic is on the encrypted TG’s. I might be out of range, but I do hear plenty of analog Pickens traffic.

Clemson will be playing at home on Sept 19, albeit at very low attendance levels.
 

KMG54

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I live in Pickens county and the only thing I here on the 800 system is Clemson Fire. I could have sworn a few years ago Easley PD was on it, but definitely not now.
 

rescuecomm

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At one time, all Pickens County EMS and Rescue Squad trucks had 800 mhz radios in them. We could use them for interop with EMS trucks and the county dispatch. Then the Sheriff's office decided that the PAL800 wasn't worth the price along with the Pickens County School system switching to DMR on their 800 system. I think that was the end of a plan to eventually fully switch to the PAL800. I'm thinking that the radio in the Easley Rescue truck was removed a while back. I don't know about the Pickens Squad's radio. The talk groups might be (and paid) only for emergency use now during interops. Emergency Management had an XTS2500 radio cache (about 20 or so radios) that have been used on the Glassy Mountain SCTAC conventional 800 repeater during forest fire and train derailments. I don't think they were ever used on the trunked system. They were previously used on SCTAC4D at the Pumpkin Festival to exercise the batteries. I don't know if that use has been continued.

Bob
 

mattbrissey

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To my best knowledge, the 800 radios are used when Pickens county has an event like a winter storm, flooding, or tornadoes. It allows us to be able to communicate to emergency management without the usage of our main dispatch channel to keep communications clear for other parts of the county for normal calls.
 

shajoe44

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I ran DSDPlus over the weekend on the Pickens site. The following had radios "affliate" to the site but no transmissions were made. 47501, 47615, 47641, 47865 and 47670. The only agency that had transmissions was Clemson FD/EMS (47666). Also another interesting note was Greenville City PD transmits off the Pickens site but the Sheriff's dept does not. If you really want to learn the ins and outs of these sites and who can and cannot broadcast from them, load up DSDPlus and read the log event file.
 
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