loumaag
Silent Key - Aug 2014
I need to hear from the real Trunker/T4Win guru's here. It seems that the SD State VHF Trunking system is configured in a way to confuse Trunker and makes T4Win unusable.
Here are the basics. I am located in the NE part of the state now and can hear two seperate sites on the system. The system is a 3600 Baud Motorla digital VHF system. As far as I can tell, all communications are in digital mode. I monitor the system using my Pro-96, set up in accordance to the offset, base, step information given here on the site. Control channels were found by scanning as the frequency table reported here on the site is woefully inaccurate. (A topic for another thread.)
When I run Trunker (V 3.8.3) on either site, after it does it's initial analyzing of the data stream it reports the system as a "Type II NetCap" with a 105.88Hz CT. It does not get the SysID (which stays at the default "1234" but does report the data channel as a voice channel constatnly being keyed by talkgroup 34816 in "emergency" mode. This equates to x880A, which is the SysID according to my Pro-96. I am sort of working around the problem by setting up seperate sub-directory for the system (like you would do for ETrunk decoding). Doing this allows me to leave the SysID as 1234 and still set it up as a VHF system swapping the hex channel numbers for observed audio channels. Trunker, given the above problems, then works but is "slow" to report sometimes, as I can hear a conversation but sometimes it does not get reported right away on the screen. I am getting Hi-Qual signal decoding (between 85 & 89 % on one site and 90 - 99 % on the other) runing in DOS mode. At other times it will easily report multiple conversations going on quite as I am used to seeing from trunker.
T4Win on the other hand reports nothing other than the dump you can see by observing the receiver data stream. It does show I am getting between 95-100% decoding of a Motorola stream but it never reports LCN's, Talkgroups, or RadioID's and of course it does not see a SysID so it never setsup a datafile.
The amount of data (while observing the dump in T4Win) seemed like a lot so I ran Dumper (DOS) on it so that I could get a view of what was in the data stream. The only problem with this, is I really don't know what I am looking at in the Dump.txt file and cannot find a "magic decoder ring" for it although I thought I had one somewhere.
I have attached the file for anyone who might like to look at it. I will tell you that the data frequency for this stream was 158.6400 (shows as ch# x01d) and that a three trasnmission conversation took place on 159.1650 (shows as ch# x237). This data dump is less than 30 seconds long and one aspect of it tends to agree with something observed in the Trunker data files, whicht is the "Hits" counters are all out of whack. A single transmission may show as many as 25 hits.
I have not used TReport (have never used it before) so cannot comment on that. The question is, has anyone else ever observed some or all of these things before? Is there a solution to getting either Trunker or T4Win to work right? Has the SD IT group found a way to confound some aspects of monitoring the system? I should note that none of this affects the way my Pro-96 which seems to work fine on the system.
Here are the basics. I am located in the NE part of the state now and can hear two seperate sites on the system. The system is a 3600 Baud Motorla digital VHF system. As far as I can tell, all communications are in digital mode. I monitor the system using my Pro-96, set up in accordance to the offset, base, step information given here on the site. Control channels were found by scanning as the frequency table reported here on the site is woefully inaccurate. (A topic for another thread.)
When I run Trunker (V 3.8.3) on either site, after it does it's initial analyzing of the data stream it reports the system as a "Type II NetCap" with a 105.88Hz CT. It does not get the SysID (which stays at the default "1234" but does report the data channel as a voice channel constatnly being keyed by talkgroup 34816 in "emergency" mode. This equates to x880A, which is the SysID according to my Pro-96. I am sort of working around the problem by setting up seperate sub-directory for the system (like you would do for ETrunk decoding). Doing this allows me to leave the SysID as 1234 and still set it up as a VHF system swapping the hex channel numbers for observed audio channels. Trunker, given the above problems, then works but is "slow" to report sometimes, as I can hear a conversation but sometimes it does not get reported right away on the screen. I am getting Hi-Qual signal decoding (between 85 & 89 % on one site and 90 - 99 % on the other) runing in DOS mode. At other times it will easily report multiple conversations going on quite as I am used to seeing from trunker.
T4Win on the other hand reports nothing other than the dump you can see by observing the receiver data stream. It does show I am getting between 95-100% decoding of a Motorola stream but it never reports LCN's, Talkgroups, or RadioID's and of course it does not see a SysID so it never setsup a datafile.
The amount of data (while observing the dump in T4Win) seemed like a lot so I ran Dumper (DOS) on it so that I could get a view of what was in the data stream. The only problem with this, is I really don't know what I am looking at in the Dump.txt file and cannot find a "magic decoder ring" for it although I thought I had one somewhere.
I have attached the file for anyone who might like to look at it. I will tell you that the data frequency for this stream was 158.6400 (shows as ch# x01d) and that a three trasnmission conversation took place on 159.1650 (shows as ch# x237). This data dump is less than 30 seconds long and one aspect of it tends to agree with something observed in the Trunker data files, whicht is the "Hits" counters are all out of whack. A single transmission may show as many as 25 hits.
I have not used TReport (have never used it before) so cannot comment on that. The question is, has anyone else ever observed some or all of these things before? Is there a solution to getting either Trunker or T4Win to work right? Has the SD IT group found a way to confound some aspects of monitoring the system? I should note that none of this affects the way my Pro-96 which seems to work fine on the system.
