Years ago I could pickup the city of Indianapolis, IN on their 460 MHz UHF frequencies.
They so happened to share many of the same UHF frequencies used by our City of St. Louis, MO police system back then.
I always remember that as I started hearing odd street names and odd sounding dispatchers yet the type and amount of traffic was very similar to the STL city traffic.
It had me puzzled for a good amount of time until one night I heard odd tactical traffic on a channel that STL city used for routine dispatch for one of the districts.
It was then that I realized I was hearing another city all together!
Lucky for me, I also owned the Police Call book that covered Illinois and Indiana and was able to quickly determine that it was Indianapolis Police I was hearing! This went on for some time but if memory is correct, it only occured after storms in one of the areas or maybe both and only at night. Sometimes well after midnight. This would have been when I started staying up way past my bedtime as I was just a youngster in high school back then. I'd discovered what I could hear late at night after the parents went to sleep. I must tiptoe though as my large bedroom was half above the parents room below. I later moved my radio equipment over the living room half of my room so I could move about without getting caught!
That was my first experience with long distance UHF communications and late night reception work which I still do to this day. I'd guess this to be back in the late 70's as that was about the time I purchased my first programmable scanner, the Electra Bearcat BC250.
I was also able to easily receive a UHF TV station also out of Indianapolis uisng nothing more than the good ole rabbit ear antenna on the old TV!
If I could hear Indy police, I could also watch their TV station if they had not signed off for the night which they did at like 11 PM I think. I bet those conditions lasted for almost two months and then things went back to normal and I never heard Indy again on UHF.
Oh, the low band VHF skip was also awesome back then during the afternoons after school until about sunset. Mid 70's there maybe.
I still cannot recall VHF low band skip being as good as it was back then in the 70's to this day. It's been good but not like what I remember from back then. I saved up for the BC250 one summer while working at my dads machine shop. I'd grown sick of buying crystals.
Tonight, I'm still getting great reception from the Starcom site 3-025 in Edwardsville but no signals from the others I could hear last night.
The Edwardsville tower is still booming in here tonight for me and way better than the STL Cities P25 simulcat system which is not hard to beat really.
Tonight is way different than last night was and the only thing I can think of is that the outdoor humidity level is sill rather low tonight compared to most nights at this time. It is 48% RH now while most nights at this time it is more around 80% and I get little to no reception from the Starcom site at all. I'd imagine a higher humidity can attenuate the 800 MHz signals from Starcom but they are still hitting here with barely any decode errors at all tonight. I did not think to check the RH levels last night.
Unless they have changed the antenna patterns at site 3-025 on Starcom, this is the best I've ever received anything Starcom related except for when the 3-001 (Mascoutah), 3-005 (Belleville) and 3-053 (Caseyville) sites were on the air. I used to get great reception from all three of those sites but then those went dark and the 3-059 Simulcast St. Clair site came online. I can barely detect the control channel on that site for some reason. That bummed me out as I enjoyed monitoring Starcom. Being able to monitor 3-025 last night and tonight again has been great! I just wonder ow long it will last.
Now I see lightning on the security cams so I guess it's time to disconnect for the night!
