PPB East Pct scanner ??

[uncledenny48]

What happened to the PPB East Prct scanner....it was down for a while for maintenance and then it was gone. Is it coming back ? also Central Pct..the same thing ? Any word on the provider or whats going on. Miss that East prct feed.

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

I am the provider for PPB East, the computer that serves it suffered an SSD failure of the operating system drive while I was out of town for several weeks. I'm back now, but realized that I stupidly hadn't backed up my configuration, so I'm having to rebuild/reconfigure everything from scratch, which has been time consuming. (It's all done in software with DSD+ Fastlane and Radiofeed, so there's a lot of tinkering to get it configured.) I've just about got it dialed in and ready to rebroadcast.

As for the Central feed, I just noticed that's offline too, but I didn't provide that one, so I'm not sure what the story is there. If some time goes by and that provider doesn't put it back up, I'd be willing to add a 2nd feed that broadcasts PPB Central and PSU Police (with PPB transmissions overriding PSU).

 

[uncledenny48]

Hey I appreciate your response and happy to hear that you are coming back online, as far as the PSU feed, not sure how busy they are, I know the chief former PPB guy...they use nextels quite a bit. And they have central capabilities. You and I e mailed once before I'm the retired BOEC guy, my daughter works up there so I listen in once in a while. Again thank you for getting back to us. Appreciate it.

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

Ah yes, I remember messaging with you a while back. Coming into the home stretch of getting everything configured. (Pic attached) I'll be utilizing DSD+ Fastlane, taking advantage of their new single-reciever trunk tracking feature, which should allow me to use the same hardware setup as before, but now able to feed two seperate audio streams. Previously I used two RTL Software Defined Radio USB receivers. One receiver would monitor the trunking control channel, and it would steer the second receiver to the correct voice channel, which would provide the actual audio.

Now with the new single-receiver feature, I should be able to trunk-track two discrete P25 frequencies at the same time, one on each receiver. Feed A will be PPB East Pct., and feed B will be PPB Central Pct. / PSU Police. The priority is configured so that PPB Central transmissions should always override PSU PD transmissions, but the actual functionality of the priority-jumping in single-receiver mode still needs to be tested (it works fine in dual-reciever mode).

 

[uncledenny48]

Good work....looking forward to getting those back on. Thank you for keeping me posted. I appreciate it. So we looking at a couple of weeks or so ?

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

Just submitted the applications about 90 seconds ago haha. Everything seems to be working well enough over the past couple hours of testing. I leave for some natl. guard training tomorrow and won't be back until next week, but if the applications get approved tomorrow before I take off, both feeds will be live tomorrow afternoon. If not, then it'll have to wait 'til I get back after this weekend.

 

[uncledenny48]

Wow late night guy like myself....sounds good!

 

[uncledenny48]

Just submitted the applications about 90 seconds ago haha. Everything seems to be working well enough over the past couple hours of testing. I leave for some natl. guard training tomorrow and won't be back until next week, but if the applications get approved tomorrow before I take off, both feeds will be live tomorrow afternoon. If not, then it'll have to wait 'til I get back after this weekend.

 

[uncledenny48]

Hey it's up and running...just an fyi the east feed maybe missing transmissions....it's very quiet for long stretches of time, East is the busiest net that PPB has...just a heads up...not sure about central, the audio is good though.

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

If you or someone else owns a P25 scanner, a good experiment would be to tune it to the East talkgroup, and also listen to the feed. There's usually about a 1-2 minute delay between the live audio and the feed, but it couldn't hurt to ensure that everything that's being picked up with your scanner is also showing up in the feed a minute or two later. (it might not be perfect, but I'm hoping for over 95% coverage). I'd do this experiment myself but as I was saying earlier, I'll be out of town through the weekend, which also means I'll be unable to make any tweaks to the new live feeds until then.

 

[uncledenny48]

Ya I've done that....that's what spurred this note....actually I think you might be right....there is a delay...thanks for responding. Might of been a little premature in the e mail.

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

No worries, I definitely appreciate the feedback. I can't always babysit the thing, so there have been times where something was wrong and I didn't find out until someone told me about it.

 

[uncledenny48]

Hey just wanted to let you know that Tri-Met is bleeding thru on East and maybe Hillsboro fire?
Also I was setting next to my Nephew who is a PPB officer at east and I was listening on my phone app and there were quite a bit of transmissions that didn't come thru. Just a heads up. Sorry to be a pest.
Denny

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

Not a pest at all, the feedback is welcome and valuable. I have a feeling I know why you might be hearing a few random talkgroups, I'll take a look and see if my suspicions are correct. Also, no scanner setup in the world is gonna beat a PPB cop's $5,000 motorola radio that's affiliated to the system...that said, it's an unending game of trying to fine-tune my decoder settings for the best possible reception. (if someone wants to donate a couple of those Unication pagers, I'd happily use them for the feeds in place of my RTL-SDR setup hahaha)

Either way, I'll take a look at the logs for those stray talkgroups and see what I can find.

 

[uncledenny48]

Thank you I totally understand about the east feed, I appreciate your quick response and I'm very satisfied to have it back online, I'm just trying not to have to go out and by a scanner. I'm a cheapskate.

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

Haha well as they say, "you get what you pay for"

 

[uncledenny48]

True....LOL

 

[jdm1]

Hello, thank you both for your work on this. Im using two limeSDR minis listening to the east and west P25 systems. Im interested in the PPB talk groups, I've only seen a hand full active [ 467, 669, 703, 755, 797]. Im wondering is this expected or are there more missing transmissions?

 

[V_A_R_I_A_B_L_E]

As I understand it, the West Simulcast system is the primary one and should carry all traffic, so you should be able to get away with only monitoring that one control channel as long as you have good reception.

As for the talkgroups, you definitely listed the highest traffic PPB talkgroups, but you should occasionally hear traffic on other ones, such as the Tac 2 channels. Tac 1 channels and most narcotics/investigative talkgroups are encrypted, so you may see activity on them in the channel window but won't get any audio. Encrypted talkgroups are denoted by an "E" in the mode column of the database.

 

[radiotweester]

It appears all East PPB traffic has been moved from E Dispatch to encrypted "E Tac 1". O'm not a regular listener, but it seems to have been this way for the past few days.