Road Trip

[llzel]

I'm posting here and in Illinois page. I will be driving from STL to Libertyville, IL and would like to monitor Illinois State Police.
I will be travelling through 6 ISP districts. I assume I'll need 6 sites along the way each with 3 or so control channels. My question is, on a Unication G4 should I program in all the sites and talk group ID's under one knob position? Will the G4 follow along all the sites as I travel north? If not how would you do it?

 

[WX4JCW]

What I would do is put all the talkgroups in and break them up by zones, probably familiarize yourself with each ISP district that covers the areas you travel in. and break each district into its own zone.

for the frequencies/towers you can do it one of 3 ways

full frequency scan, or make up one system entry with of of the control channels along your route, then use the wildcard for RFSS and Site ID which I believe is FFF, the latter would be the most efficient. I actually use the Latter a lot

 

[RaleighGuy]

Will the G4 follow along all the sites as I travel north? If not how would you do it?

Programming all of them in might give you issues, I'd use full spectrum scan, entering the hi/lo freq ranges and make sure you include the WACN and System ID. I use this method traveling across NC and it works very well jumping towers when one goes out of range.

 

[llzel]

Programming all of them in might give you issues, I'd use full spectrum scan, entering the hi/lo freq ranges and make sure you include the WACN and System ID. I use this method traveling across NC and it works very well jumping towers when one goes out of range.

View attachment 129106View attachment 129107

So I'm choosing 2 ranges 770.6875-774.83135 and 851.9625-853.5625?
do I enter TGID's

 

[llzel]

What I would do is put all the talkgroups in and break them up by zones, probably familiarize yourself with each ISP district that covers the areas you travel in. and break each district into its own zone.

for the frequencies/towers you can do it one of 3 ways

full frequency scan, or make up one system entry with of of the control channels along your route, then use the wildcard for RFSS and Site ID which I believe is FFF, the latter would be the most efficient. I actually use the Latter a lot

All will be on the same system across the state. So I can make each district a zone and switch over as I drive. I can do that too.

 

[RaleighGuy]

So I'm choosing 2 ranges 770.6875-774.83135 and 851.9625-853.5625?
do I enter TGID's

Unless you just want to use a wildcard, that's up to you.

 

[RaleighGuy]

All will be on the same system across the state. So I can make each district a zone and switch over as I drive. I can do that too.

Each district can be a Knob position, doesn't have to be a new zone. And, though each site has a different NAC the system ID will remain 140 and WACN BEE00

 

[llzel]

I don't want to reprogram all my knob positions then program back. I'd like to keep it on one knob position if I can. Would this work. Program knob 1 to Starcomm 21 WACN BEE00 140 (in hex) what do I enter for site? Control channel list: no setting and enable full spectrum scan than enter the low/high for frequencies as you showed. Then add all the talk group ID's for all 6 districts. Would that work?

 

[cubn]

I don't want to reprogram all my knob positions then program back. I'd like to keep it on one knob position if I can. Would this work. Program knob 1 to Starcomm 21 WACN BEE00 140 (in hex) what do I enter for site? Control channel list: no setting and enable full spectrum scan than enter the low/high for frequencies as you showed. Then add all the talk group ID's for all 6 districts. Would that work?

I added all the all the Starcom sites with all of their control frequencies via the RR import. That way no matter where in the state I go I will have coverage.

Now I have one knob for Starcom21, one for Safe-T, Ohio and Michigan respectively so as I travel I just changed knobs when I hit the state line. I put in all the state police talk groups for the respective systems and those knobs and programmed all the sites for those systems and their control channels into the respective knobs. Seems to work well but I have not compared it to any other radio scanning the systems.