Pierce County, Washington Public Safety

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ipodster

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tacoma washington
I recently bought a RS Pro-107, which has all of radioreference.com stored on a 2gb sd card. As I look at the frequencies for Tacoma, Washingrton, I am finding that there are a whole bunch of old freqs, no longer used by Tacoma Police> 460.050, 460.150, 460.300, etc. Pierce County, including Tacoma, went to trunked (I believe Motorola), a long time ago. Now my scanner, goes by what channels and data is on the sd card. You can add additional channels using a CD program and a usb port. Even still, having incorrect data for PC, after all these years is a little scary! I have been an avid radio scanner monitor for 30 years, and, in a way I wish TPD, still used this own channels. With ths scanner, I am at it's mercy. The scanner, itself, does not tell you what frequency you are listening to.
 

gmclam

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Tacoma, Sacramento and many more

Hello ipodster,

I totally agree with your comments. I have on many ocassions mentioned (for many cities) that RR lists old no longer used frequencies and have received all kinds of comments as to why they are kept in the DB listing (such as they are still licensed to use those frequencies).

Now I see the DB here has "legacy use" or some similar term next to many of these way-obsolete frequencies, but that still makes little sense to me. Even though agencies may be licensed to use these frequencies, I doubt they have the equipment to do so.

While it might be nice to list the frequencies somewhere for historical reasons, they should not be easily imported by online programming software nor exported to places like what is used by your scanner. If we need to list them, they should be on a separate page/link marked "obsolete channels".
 

madhatter66

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Western Washington
I have been trying to work with the admins to get the Kitsap database fixed as over half the freq's in there are outdated or just flat out wrong and keep getting the run around... I submit a 3 page explanation on what needs to be fixed and why, and they type seven words into the database and send me a PM to close the ticket... They need to get rid of that silly policy that they don't delete frequencies because as agencies move to trunked systems, they are dumping their old freq's... At the very least need to have a frequency archive section to place everything that is defunct... So as not to keep cluttering the database with useless info, or like the OP said, is getting used by a company to build a database for their scanners... Can you imagine someone that either was totally new and didn't know any better or never found this site? They would end up wasting most of their time scanning freq's that no longer are used...

Be careful though, not all of Pierce is trunked... Its about 50/50 trunked and non trunked IIRC... One of the major problems is the sheriff's department covers such a HUGE area out to the east that they estimate that their towers would, at the very least, double if not triple if they went trunked, if it was even feasible in the first place ... So they are still conventional... Tacoma and Puyallup are trunked, and I don't believe Fife, Buckley, Orting or Sumner are trunked on their system... Personally I just think there are not a lot of people that are submitting for Pierce, or the Admins are just doing the least amount of work to skate by and the database suffers in the end... :mad:
 

kd7kdc

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Old Data

Hi All
I would like to say that I do want to keep the database accurate.
I don't mind inputing data all day.
I think the depriciated tag should force the od frequencies to be hidden
from upload programs and from OEMs when they load the SD cards so
this dosent happen, I will mention this to the developer team.
The other hand is the department radio shops will use the old still/expired licensed
frequencies for special projects so they may still have traffic from them at times.
DB admins have to wonder what the motivation is for the people submitting the delete
requests are if they are truly no longer used or they are a department/agency employee
that dose not want their frequencies published for what ever reason so they send us
a list of BS frequencies and ask us to delete the old ones.

73
Steve
 

ipodster

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tacoma washington
Old Frequencies

With all respect, the frequencies listed for Tacoma Washingtonn PD, ae incorrect, and are dinasours, as Tacoma PD, has gone trunked. They still may hold a license to 460.50, 460.150, 460.300, but they abandoned those, when they went trunking. With RS Pro-107, using a SD card, with frequencies from RadioReference, it makes me blink--wondering if the reason I cannot get some of the trunked talkgroups, is because you don't have them on the SD card; instead, using the old freqs. As a scanner user of 30+ years, when I see outdated radio frequencies listed, instead of the current one's, the credibility, goes way south!

Thanks,
Ipodster
 

madhatter66

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Western Washington
I cannot speak for all dispatchers, but as an employee of a dispatch center, I actually slightly offended that you would think that of a dispatcher. First, most of us know people scan, so if there is something that shouldn't be on the air, we take measures to make sure that doest happen. Second, we understand that people use scanners for good, volunteers, neighborhood watch organizations and people that are just want to know what is going on in their community, most of us are fine with scanners out there as we are public service employee's, being paid by tax payers and using public airwaves to talk to peace officers that are also public servants. While there are some bad apples out there, most of us will take the time to talk to people that call and ask about our frequencies and how to program their scanners. We want to make sure that people have the right information.

The other side of this would be to create an archive link, just like a business is built in the database, heck create a business called Pierce Archive for instance and dump what people are calling to delete in the Archive... It just seems totally counter intuitive to be leaving a mass of unused and out dated frequencies out there... As I mentioned before, people call us and complain about the RR database, because they use the frequencies listed, and end up with the wrong ones, or they will tell me they are confused by what is listed and that they see two or three different freq's listed for the same function. People are confused, and if they are not hard-core scanner hobbyists then I totally get that and blame the database for that because it is confusing, and leads to the credibility of RR going down...
 

ipodster

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Aug 3, 2009
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tacoma washington
Amen!

You can read my post/comments on this.

Ipodster

Hello ipodster,

I totally agree with your comments. I have on many ocassions mentioned (for many cities) that RR lists old no longer used frequencies and have received all kinds of comments as to why they are kept in the DB listing (such as they are still licensed to use those frequencies).

Now I see the DB here has "legacy use" or some similar term next to many of these way-obsolete frequencies, but that still makes little sense to me. Even though agencies may be licensed to use these frequencies, I doubt they have the equipment to do so.

While it might be nice to list the frequencies somewhere for historical reasons, they should not be easily imported by online programming software nor exported to places like what is used by your scanner. If we need to list them, they should be on a separate page/link marked "obsolete channels".
 

gmclam

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Be careful though, not all of Pierce is trunked... ... One of the major problems is the sheriff's department covers such a HUGE area out to the east that they estimate that their towers would,
While this issue is not related to a single entity, this thread was started to talk about specific frequencies for TACOMA, not Pierce county.

The issue is not trunked vs non-trunked, the issue is what is presently being used vs stuff that is not used and has not been used in years.
 

madhatter66

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Western Washington
While this issue is not related to a single entity, this thread was started to talk about specific frequencies for TACOMA, not Pierce county.

The issue is not trunked vs non-trunked, the issue is what is presently being used vs stuff that is not used and has not been used in years.

Well seeing as Tacoma is in Pierce County, my statement is valid as the RP was talking about worthless frequencies... You need to relax a tad, as the OP said "Pierce County, including Tacoma, went to trunked" Which is not a totally correct statement as there are still agencies in Pierce County, to include the agencies in the city of Tacoma that are not trunked... Learn to read the entire context before flaming someone next time...
 
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bogwan

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I for one have been following this thread and find it very interesting that people from out of state are on here flaming for no apparent reason.

Also some valid posts which were on here have been magically removed or edited.

What is with that?

As long as I am on here I for one will not send in frequencies or corrections for the database for free and then have them sold to GRE, Radio Shack and Uniden
to put in their scanners. I paid to have a subscription to this site and feel that is not very ethical to make a profit from my input.

If you choose to remove my post that is your decision but when it comes time to renew my subscription you will never get another cent from me.
 
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madhatter66

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Western Washington
WTF Where is my last post? There was a second post just after my comment on 9/8 that I posted, with valid points and they deleted it? Now we as a community complain and get censored? Must not look good for business with the huge corporations they sell our submissions to, having the very people that they tap for submission complaining about their submissions being ignored... I hope the Mod that decided to censor me can at the very least PM me to explain why they decided my complaint wasn't valid... :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
 

burner50

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I for one have been following this thread and find it very interesting that people from out of state are on here flaming for no apparent reason.

Also some valid posts which were on here have been magically removed or edited.

What is with that?

What is with that, is that the flaming posts were deleted. I deleted them.

Many of those "Valid" posts were nothing more than more flamewars waiting to happen, and none of them were on topic.

As long as I am on here I for one will not send in frequencies or corrections for the database for free and then have them sold to GRE, Radio Shack and Uniden
to put in their scanners. I paid to have a subscription to this site and feel that is not very ethical to make a profit from my input.

Must not look good for business with the huge corporations they sell our submissions to, having the very people that they tap for submission complaining about their submissions being ignored...

No information has been sold to anybody. The Database is free, and the scanner manufacturers have made their devices able to take advantage of the FREE database here to make scanners easier to use. If you do not want to send updated information in, that is your choice. Nobody is forcing anybody to submit information here.

If you choose to remove my post that is your decision but when it comes time to renew my subscription you will never get another cent from me.

WTF Where is my last post? There was a second post just after my comment on 9/8 that I posted, with valid points and they deleted it? Now we as a community complain and get censored?

I hope the Mod that decided to censor me can at the very least PM me to explain why they decided my complaint wasn't valid... :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:


I do not believe in editing posts as the resulting post may reflect something that the poster was not trying to say. I do not pretend to speak to speak for anybody. So when there is posts that require moderator action, I delete them instead of edit them. You were not being censored, in fact there is much I have to say on the topic


This thread has been turned into an off topic whine fest that had attracted a shill for another website that has problems with this one. This is not the first time, and I fear that it will not be the last.


If you have had problems with the DBA's then I suggest you contact the database manager so the situation can be resolved.
 
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blantonl

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Folks,

I'm looking through all the submissions over the past year for Pierce County and no one has submitted anything that indicates what information for Tacoma is no longer in use.

If someone could submit the info that indicates what frequencies in Tacoma we have that are no longer in use, we'll be glad to immediately set them to deprecated and/or delete them from the database.

Thanks,
 
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