Programing and setup question

[blue5011]

The downside of using Close Call to monitor a trunked system, such as ARMER, is that you will not always follow a conversation. If the frequency is released before the called party answers, it could be re-used by a completely different talkgroup.

True.

But since I would be traveling/ driving, I may or may not be paying fully attention. The shootings, murders, and traffic jams in the Twin Cities do not "make my day". And honestly, on the road, I get better traffic updates on my CB radio.

And yes, I would program such in, IF I am going to say Chanhassen, to see the Purple Wonder Palace.

 

[wogggieee]

The downside of using Close Call to monitor a trunked system, such as ARMER, is that you will not always follow a conversation. If the frequency is released before the called party answers, it could be re-used by a completely different talkgroup.

Well, you also have to be very close to the transmitting unit to hear anything.

 

[jason_58201]

So basically what I have done is programed my scanner like this. I may make tweaks and adjustments along the way.
qk 1 is just my local crookston twr with All state tg except corrections. All local county and city tg's. within Polk Co. Then I have another system on qk 1 with local crookston tower and the surrounding county's TG's, and local county vhf freqs. (yes we still have some counties and cities on vhf up here.)
qk 2 is the same as above with the exception it is all sites within the county and adjacent counties. all set to ATT as well. This is for when I am out and about within the county and local area.
qk 3-6 are open for future expansion or changes.
qk7 is railroad
qk8 is federal freqs
qk9 is statewide interop
qk10 empty
qk 11 is ND State Radio, Walsh Co. Trail Co. Grand Forks Co/City, Cass Co/Fargo all divided into groups.
12-28 empty
29 MnSP 2900 with all sites within district, All State ID's except MNDoT, All county tagged ID's. It's not fast but it works for traveling outside my local area.
30-31 Empty
32 MnSP 3200 with all sites within district, All State ID's except MNDoT, All county tagged ID's. Again, it's not fast but it works for now.
33-51 Empty
52 is MNDoT District 2 all sites with MNDoT TG's.
53 is open
54 is MNDoT District 4 all sites with MNDoT TG's.
55-99 open

It sure would be a whole lot easier if MNDoT and SP had the same districts.
Eventually as I get time I'll do the same for the rest of the SP districts and MNDot Districts along with programing individual counties that I frequent often into separate qk's.

Some notes about this area.
1. There is an entire part of the state of Minnesota north of I-94 or even highway 10 that most people don't know about. We have counties still on vhf. We have counties and cities that share all their channels. We have counties with less than 3000 people. We even have a county that has no stop-lights at all. It's not uncommon because of how flat it is here to pickup ARMER twr's 20-30 miles away albeit with a very weak signal. I have found it best to set my ARMER system to ATT to help curb this so it locks onto a stronger signal. As i stated before, there are still some counties on vhf and are only patched to ARMER. From my understanding it is only the main county channel patched as well so there is still need and reason to program county vhf channels for those counties.

It was asked why would I want to program the entire state? So I don't have to do it again for starters. So that while yes I scan in search mode, I'd rather have the whole state programed so that when I get a hit I get a tag rather than a number.

I am also finding not all tg's that have been reserved are in fact being used. There are new ones popping up that weren't on the reserved list in the DB.

Again thanks for the discussion. This is great.

 

[ofd8001]

I believe you have a very workable program for your scanner. I'd suggest leaving ATT Off, however. ATT is beneficial when you are in an area with a lot of RF saturation. For example in the Twin Cities.

However, given your area (I've spent a lot of time up there and know the "lay of the land"), you don't have that predicament. How "far" an ARMER transmitter goes is very dependent on the area it serves. Around the cities, it would be that 15 miles. Out in the rural areas, 30 miles isn't out of the question. I'm pretty sure I was getting signal off the Crookston tower in East Grand Forks around the beet factory (wasn't mistaking it for the EGF tower at Hwy 2/220). Plus the terrain is really flat up there, being good for RF.

 

[jason_58201]

The problem I have run into though is if i don't use att, I lock on a distant tower with a weak signal and don't get good reception rather than locking on a closer tower. That's why I generally use it with armer in this area. your right though. I can pick up armer towers 30 miles away or more because of how flat it is here.

 

[ofd8001]

When it comes to a digital radio system, like ARMER, it's either good signal or no signal. While you may quantifiably have a weak digital signal, since digital is all 0s or 1s, you don't need a strong signal for decoding. I can very clearly hear a digital conversation, even though there are no bars vsible on the meter.

Thus if you are in Crookston in front of Widman's candy store (great chippers) and get the EGF tower with 1-2 bars, any communications will be just as clear as if you were hearing them on the Crookston tower.

I'm not sure how affiliations are provisioned up there. Unless EGFPD is forced on the Crookston tower along with the EGF tower, you may miss their traffic (if you are interested in them) if you don't monitor the EGF tower. The only comms I know that are "forced" on multiple towers are the state patrol mains - the 3200 Main is on all towers in that district.

The same would hold true for monitoring Grand Forks ND with their digital conventional system - you'll either have them or you won't.

Of course my bias is that I like to hear everything I possibly can, so I tend to reach out as far as possible.

 

[jason_58201]

Around here, the trend seems to be that you can hear every talkgroup in the immediate surrounding counties. Since I live just outside of crookston, I listen to only the crookston twr. I hear CPD, EGFPD, Polk CO, Norman Co patch, Red Lake Co Patch, Pennington Co Patch and of course State of MN tg's. I also can pickup RL County vhf, Pennington Co. Vhf. That's the normal traffic I get. When I go for a little afternoon drive then I'll switch to another QK that has all the surrounding area towers.