RTLSDR - How to get the most out of settings (Charlotte UASI Phase I)

[dchambers28269]

I'm a total newbie. Charlotte UASI Phase I - I live in the city and close to a tower. I bought 4 dongles each with an antenna, a power USB hub and downloaded SDRTrunk. After many hours of reading, researching, calibrating, and doing something with Zadig I finally hear voices! I have some questions I just can't find answers for and I'm hoping you nice people will help. Any information you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

1. In the Playlist editor - Should I only have 1 Channel setup, or should I have 4? Right now, I have a Control Channel and 3 Voice Tuner channels but not sure that is necessary?
2. Alias -- No matter if I mute and "don't record" every single talk group except say CFD Alarm and CMPD Univ Conv and list it as priority 1/2 I still don't get all the traffic for that talkgroup. " Max traffic channels exceeded" or "channel start tuner unavailable". Is the Alias/Priority reliable or am I doing something wrong? In my screenshot you can see CMPD Univ Conv - Chanel started Tuner Unavailable and I can't figure out why.
3. How many dongles would you think I would need to hear all CMPD and Fire calls?
4. Can you look at my settings and advise how I can tweak to get the most out of sdrtrunk?
5. Is there a way with a Windows laptop to organize and play back the recordings as opposed to just clicking on individual files? As you know so many are just 1 second clips.

My stuff:
(4) V4 R828D RTL2832U 1PPM TCXO HF Bias Tee SMA Software Defined Radio with Dipole Antenna Kit
1 - Power USB Hub
sdrtrunk v0.6.1

 

[DSheirer]

You just need the control channel(s).

Increase your max traffic channels from 3 to 20 or 30 so that it can allocate all the calls that it detects. That constraint is really meant for underpowered computers.

 

[Enforcer52]

Not to answer all your questions, but you only need 1 sdr set to the control channel in your playlist, the other three should not be designated with control channels, they are left free to go to what ever frequency the main control channels needs them to.. The software will direct the other three tuners when receiving a call.

EDIT: The other three should not be auto-started and playing. All set to the same control channel is redundant.

 

[Enforcer52]

Did you put different serial numbers on all the sdrs using the rtl_eeprom.exe program?

 

[dchambers28269]

Did you put different serial numbers on all the sdrs using the rtl_eeprom.exe program?

Yes I did.

 

[dchambers28269]

Thank you everyone for the tips! I'm getting lots more calls now! So many of them are only 1 sec long and cut off. Any idea what's going on when that happens and how i can fix it?

 

[Enforcer52]

What is the gain set on all of the sdrs? and the PPM

 

[dave3825]

Gain may be too low and your PPM may be off. You are getting some sync loss as seen in your pic

 

[dchambers28269]

ok i've been playing around with gain and the ppm and finally got it going really good! however, what makes it play for a couple of hours picking up beautifully and then all of a sudden it's nothing but 'SYNCL OSS SYNCL OSS SYNC LOSS". Sometimes if i restart sdrtrunk it fixes itself.