Pro96Com Question about Adjacent Site Information using Pro96Com

[Heywood49]

While using Pro96Com, the adjacent site info for my home parish (county) are showing adjacent sites 200 miles away and showing that it's connected my local tower or site is connected. When I check on the data on the RadioReference.com site, the neighboring site data seems to be correct showing the parishes that are actually adjacent to mine. It would seem that the data in the Pro96Com software for my local site is wrong. The adjacent sites shown in Pro96Com for example are 403, 404, 407, 408, etc. However on RadioReference the adjacent sites are 102, 104 110, etc.

Is there anyway to download new site information directly into Pro96Com or edit it manually? I am using the newest version.

Any info is appreciated.

Heywood

 

[maus92]

What system are you monitoring, and did you download data from RRDB into Pro96Com?

 

[Jay911]

It's entirely possible that the system considers a site that far away to be a "neighbor". I have sites 75-80 miles away in my neighbor list right now on the system I monitor, and if I was watching some other sites, they have neighbors that are farther away.

With PRO96COM not operating ("Stop Data Decode"), you can go into the My Documents\PRO96COM\System### folder (### is your system ID), find Tower######.txt (###### is the RFSS and Site ID), and edit it in Notepad. You can delete the entire "-Neighbors" section of the file (including the header) and PRO96COM will repopulate it when you restart it ("Read Data From Radio").

I would consider the data the site is feeding to you to be more correct than RR, with one quasi-exception. Depending how good your antenna is, it is possible you may be receiving both the site you want and a more distant site with the same frequency for its control channel. I recently experienced something like this where 771.59375 was both the CC for my local site and for a site about 75 miles away from me. Conditions were just good enough for me to pick up a frame every now and then from the distant site, and I would get things like neighbors from really far away or affiliations meant for the distant site instead of the local one. Actual professional radios get around this kind of mixup by validating the NAC of the site (and/or the RFSS/Site ID) which tends to be unique to each site. Scanners just say "yup, that's a control channel" and provide you any data they hear.

Having said all that - if you are consistently getting neighbor data that says a site is a neighbor, the odds are good it's the truth.

 

[Heywood49]

Monitoring St. James tower in LWIN. I tried downloading from RRDB using Pro96Com but nothing change as far as the neighboring sites info. I know it doesn't really matter much it it would be nice to see which other nearby sites my local tower was connected to.

The sites that it shows connected to are for the most part over 150-200 miles from me. I'm using a homemade antenna but I KNOW it's not that good! LOL!!

Thanks for the quick reply

 

[Heywood49]

It's entirely possible that the system considers a site that far away to be a "neighbor". I have sites 75-80 miles away in my neighbor list right now on the system I monitor, and if I was watching some other sites, they have neighbors that are farther away.

With PRO96COM not operating ("Stop Data Decode"), you can go into the My Documents\PRO96COM\System### folder (### is your system ID), find Tower######.txt (###### is the RFSS and Site ID), and edit it in Notepad. You can delete the entire "-Neighbors" section of the file (including the header) and PRO96COM will repopulate it when you restart it ("Read Data From Radio").

I would consider the data the site is feeding to you to be more correct than RR, with one quasi-exception. Depending how good your antenna is, it is possible you may be receiving both the site you want and a more distant site with the same frequency for its control channel. I recently experienced something like this where 771.59375 was both the CC for my local site and for a site about 75 miles away from me. Conditions were just good enough for me to pick up a frame every now and then from the distant site, and I would get things like neighbors from really far away or affiliations meant for the distant site instead of the local one. Actual professional radios get around this kind of mixup by validating the NAC of the site (and/or the RFSS/Site ID) which tends to be unique to each site. Scanners just say "yup, that's a control channel" and provide you any data they hear.

Having said all that - if you are consistently getting neighbor data that says a site is a neighbor, the odds are good it's the truth.

Jay - I will try the data as you suggested and see what happens. I will let it repopulate. And I also see what you mean about other sites interacting.

Thanks for the help...

 

[Heywood49]

Jay - I will try the data as you suggested and see what happens. I will let it repopulate. And I also see what you mean about other sites interacting.

Thanks for the help...

This is what I found out:

I deleted all saved data and started like when I first installed Pro96Com. Once I started decoding it showed the neighboring site data same as before and even before it recognized my local site. I went to the packet dump screen and decoded the data there and it is showing the same information for whatever reason. Maybe the control channels are getting mixed up....

 

[Jay911]

Looking at the maps, it does seem strange that any RFSS 4 sites would show up as neighbors. Sometimes that would be legitimate if you were on a border of two sites (i.e. if you were on the border of RFSS 1 and the next nearest site was in RFSS 4). There do appear to be a bunch of sites in between you and some of those RFSS 4 sites you mentioned in your original post.

Couple of things to keep in mind:

1. The "neighboring sites" data stored in the RRDB on each site's details page is not used by PRO96COM or any other program, as far as I know. It's just text and is optional to put in the record.

2. The neighboring site data (and the rest of the data) for St James appears to be from 2012 if you believe the text comment below the neighbor info. A lot can have changed since then.

3. The neighbor sites broadcast that a system puts out is for the benefit of the subscriber radio to tell them what other channels to listen to for nearby towers, if the current control channel gets too weak. As far as I know, no scanners make use of this info at present. It would be awesome if they did, because then they would roam off of weak signals a lot better than they do now.

4. Neighbors don't necessarily have to be geographically close. Any site can be a neighbor and with modern radio tech they don't even have to be able to hear each other. My province's system has satellite links for many of its sites, including its two deployable sites on wheels - and when they go up, they show as having one neighbor site in the provincial capital - even though they could be as far as 500 miles away from there.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, but it could give you a reason to go for a drive and figure out if they changed some site numbers in LWIN or something.

 

[Heywood49]

Looking at the maps, it does seem strange that any RFSS 4 sites would show up as neighbors. Sometimes that would be legitimate if you were on a border of two sites (i.e. if you were on the border of RFSS 1 and the next nearest site was in RFSS 4). There do appear to be a bunch of sites in between you and some of those RFSS 4 sites you mentioned in your original post.

Couple of things to keep in mind:

1. The "neighboring sites" data stored in the RRDB on each site's details page is not used by PRO96COM or any other program, as far as I know. It's just text and is optional to put in the record.

2. The neighboring site data (and the rest of the data) for St James appears to be from 2012 if you believe the text comment below the neighbor info. A lot can have changed since then.

3. The neighbor sites broadcast that a system puts out is for the benefit of the subscriber radio to tell them what other channels to listen to for nearby towers, if the current control channel gets too weak. As far as I know, no scanners make use of this info at present. It would be awesome if they did, because then they would roam off of weak signals a lot better than they do now.

4. Neighbors don't necessarily have to be geographically close. Any site can be a neighbor and with modern radio tech they don't even have to be able to hear each other. My province's system has satellite links for many of its sites, including its two deployable sites on wheels - and when they go up, they show as having one neighbor site in the provincial capital - even though they could be as far as 500 miles away from there.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, but it could give you a reason to go for a drive and figure out if they changed some site numbers in LWIN or something.

Jay - I see what you mean. There are a some between here and the Texas state line. I have relatives near Houston that we are visitiing soon. That would be an excellent reconnaissance mission!!

Thanks again for the insight. And like you said, it doesn't really mean much.