Another short story about life in the radio world:
While I was still a patrolman on the police department I was working the street one evening shift and all of a sudden, we started hearing another town coming thru our repeater system. It sounded like just mobiles, and we were getting unusual MDC decodes on the system. I went to the Comm Center and watched the Comparator Panel to see if I could figure out which receiver(s) it was coming thru.
For those of you who don’t know; a Comparator is a system that takes audio from several receivers connected to a repeater system and compares the audio quality from each. It then takes the best audio and sends it to the repeater for rebroadcast. It would also display the various receiver statuses, whether that receiver was receiving, which was selected and where the receiver was in Fail status.
By getting some street locations we found the transmissions was likely from another suburb 40-45 miles away that operated on the same UHF frequency with a different PL code. Since we were hearing multiple units, we figured that the PL decoder on one of the receivers failed and it was hearing in Carrier Squelch (CSQ). We confirmed that by programming a radio to transmit in CSQ on the input and sure enough it came thru loud and clear.
For a couple reasons uninteresting to the reader there was one receiver that was not connected to the remote display in the comm center. Since none of the other receivers were hitting it was a good bet that that receiver was the culprit. Since by now it was getting close to my 11:00 PM quitting time I called our radio service company and told them to check the receiver on the Water Tower as it was operating in CSQ mode. We then disabled that receiver at the main panel at the repeater and I went home.
At 5AM I get a phone call from the radio service tech. He said had been to each of the sites and all were working properly. I asked him if he had been to the water tower. He said no since it was disabled. I then asked him to read back the notes from the service call. He did and I said so if you knew we said it was the water tower receiver then why did you check all the others? He had no answer to that, I think he realized he screwed up and wasted 3 hours driving all over creation. He went to the water tower and discovered lo and behold, that the PL board on the MastR-II failed. By then I got out of bed, dressed and drove the 40 minutes to work and met him there. We had a few old Mastr-II receivers we scavenged from a neighboring system when they replaced their system a year before and snagged a PL board from one. Once it was installed it worked fine.
The next day I get a call from our service manager, and I related the story to him. He said the tech had mentioned that he thought we might complain about him. I hadn’t planned on it but since they called us, I did request he not be assigned to our system anymore as he just did not have the right stuff. I heard later that he left the company a few months later.
While I was still a patrolman on the police department I was working the street one evening shift and all of a sudden, we started hearing another town coming thru our repeater system. It sounded like just mobiles, and we were getting unusual MDC decodes on the system. I went to the Comm Center and watched the Comparator Panel to see if I could figure out which receiver(s) it was coming thru.
For those of you who don’t know; a Comparator is a system that takes audio from several receivers connected to a repeater system and compares the audio quality from each. It then takes the best audio and sends it to the repeater for rebroadcast. It would also display the various receiver statuses, whether that receiver was receiving, which was selected and where the receiver was in Fail status.
By getting some street locations we found the transmissions was likely from another suburb 40-45 miles away that operated on the same UHF frequency with a different PL code. Since we were hearing multiple units, we figured that the PL decoder on one of the receivers failed and it was hearing in Carrier Squelch (CSQ). We confirmed that by programming a radio to transmit in CSQ on the input and sure enough it came thru loud and clear.
For a couple reasons uninteresting to the reader there was one receiver that was not connected to the remote display in the comm center. Since none of the other receivers were hitting it was a good bet that that receiver was the culprit. Since by now it was getting close to my 11:00 PM quitting time I called our radio service company and told them to check the receiver on the Water Tower as it was operating in CSQ mode. We then disabled that receiver at the main panel at the repeater and I went home.
At 5AM I get a phone call from the radio service tech. He said had been to each of the sites and all were working properly. I asked him if he had been to the water tower. He said no since it was disabled. I then asked him to read back the notes from the service call. He did and I said so if you knew we said it was the water tower receiver then why did you check all the others? He had no answer to that, I think he realized he screwed up and wasted 3 hours driving all over creation. He went to the water tower and discovered lo and behold, that the PL board on the MastR-II failed. By then I got out of bed, dressed and drove the 40 minutes to work and met him there. We had a few old Mastr-II receivers we scavenged from a neighboring system when they replaced their system a year before and snagged a PL board from one. Once it was installed it worked fine.
The next day I get a call from our service manager, and I related the story to him. He said the tech had mentioned that he thought we might complain about him. I hadn’t planned on it but since they called us, I did request he not be assigned to our system anymore as he just did not have the right stuff. I heard later that he left the company a few months later.
