I've got the grecom 600 digital, and I want to pick up the Detroit PD and Oakland County Sheriff once they switch over to the new frequencies:
"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Home Page issued an order in July, 2004) requiring all Public Safety radios (NPSPAC) operating in the 821-824 and 866-869 MHz frequencies to change their operating frequency to a newly created Public Safety Band at 806-809 and 851-854 MHz"
Am I going to be out of luck?
sorry if I hijacked the thread, I'm rather new and I guess I stepped on toes. I'll sit back and read posts and try to glean what I can that way...
With a couple of caveats, you should be ok.
1. The new Oakland County CLEMIS public safety radio system uses Ma/Com Open Sky digital coding. There is no scanner or receiver on the consumer market that can decode Open Sky radio transmissions. The likelihood of there being one eventually is somewhere between slim and none. The big selling point of Open Sky is that it can't be monitored, and Harris-Ma/Com is not going to make that protocol open in the same sense that P-25 is. Again, the impossibility to monitor Oakland's CLEMIS system has nothing to do with the frequencies it uses, and everything to do with the encoding protocol that is used. In that sense, you-and everyone else-is unfortunately out of luck.
2. I see your location is Wixom. Is that where you plan to monitor Detroit from? Reason being is that Detroit's towers are very directional so that the signal points back into the city, and I don't think the Detroit system uses the Northville tower. From Wixom, about the only way to get Detroit tower 701 is to put up an outside beam antenna pointed towards the southeast (towards Detroit), and you might be able to receive them. Just maybe. This is what I've read here, I don't own a digital scanner so I've never had reason to try it myself.
That's not to say your scanner is useless. There is still plenty to be heard on the state MPSCS in your area. All of the western Wayne county agencies (Northville, Northville Twp, Plymouth, Canton, etc) use it. Livingston county uses it, and Washtenaw county will be using it soon. With an antenna tuned specifically to 800 MHz, or even a rudimentary outside antenna, you should be able to monitor all of these areas from Wixom. For that matter, I understand that some of the cities in southwest Oakland county are considering it (as opposed to the county system), like Novi and Lyon township.
