Sentinel: Small Favorites List on State-wide Trunked System

[wgforster]

Got a SDS200 and using Sentinel to program a fav list of just my immediate fire/police agencies. Specifically Ohio, Montgomery County and I want Centerville Police and Washington Township fire, that's it. They are on a statewide P25 system. I drill down through the county list in Sentinel and select just the Washington Township Fire and append to my FL. When I open this FL with the editor, Wash Township is there but so is every other county in Ohio. And each one of those counties has a list of freqs associated with it. So when I write this FL to the scanner and start scanning, I can see that the scanner is stepping through every county in the list. If I edit the FL and remove every county except the local police and fire that I'm interested in, and write it to the scanner, the scanner says Nothing To Scan. I know about making sure that the proper services are selected, that's not the problem. And yes, download and monitor are turned on. It seems as if because it is a statewide system you can't carve out just a couple agencies and discard all the other counties? I don't get it. My work around has been to use my zip location, set my range to zero and then scan and permanently avoid all the surrounding agencies that I don't want to monitor. I feel like I'm missing the obvious but I'm stumped. Any insight would be appreciated.

 

[dave3825]

I want Centerville Police and Washington Township fire, that's it.

It seems as if because it is a statewide system you can't carve out just a couple agencies and discard all the other counties?

You can. Import the whole system into a favorites list. Delete or avoid all Departments you do not want. Then delete all sites that are nowhere near you. Set the system to Id Scan. Write to the scanner.

 

[jtwalker]

Sounds like you are deleting/avoiding all sites, not as @dave3825 suggests above.

 

[dave3825]

I want Centerville Police and Washington Township fire, that's it.

Import the whole system into a favorites list. Delete all sites except these two.

1 (1)	005 (5)	Dayton	Montgomery	772.85625	773.13125	773.48125	774.05625	774.55625c	774.83125c	851.0625
				852.100	853.575	853.750	855.2125	856.2125	856.7125	857.2125
				858.2125	859.2125
4 (4)	003 (3)	Montgomery County	Montgomery	851.175	851.325	851.375	851.575	851.800	851.850	851.9375
				852.0625	852.1625	852.325	852.350	852.550	852.625	852.650
				853.200	853.250	853.325c	853.500	853.600c	854.0375	854.5375
				854.6625	856.4625	856.9625	857.9625	858.8125	858.9625	859.0125
				859.4625c	859.9625c

Delete all Departments you have no interest in, except these two,

Montgomery County (57) Law Enforcement which has,

58160	e330	D	57 CVPD DISP	Centerville Police Dispatch	Law Dispatch
58161	e331	D	57 CVPD TAC1	Centerville Police Tac 1	Law Tac

Montgomery County (57) Fire/EMS/Hospitals which has,

58356	e3f4	D	57 WTFD	Washington Township Fire Dispatch	Fire Dispatch
58358	e3f6	D	57 WTFD CHAT	Washington Township Fire Chatter	Fire-Talk

Your two remaining Departments have a bunch of other talk groups in them. So either delete or set to avoid, anything in each Department you have no interest in.

If you set the system to Id Scan, it will only scan the tg's you have in your favorites list, which is what you want. Enable the proper service types.


Here is some info on Sentinel and the radio.

Sds100/200 E Z Read Scanner Manual

Sentinel E Z Read Software Manual

 

[drdispatch]

Or just append those two departments, then all you have to delete is the unwanted sites.

 

[wgforster]

Slowly coming up to speed on trunked systems. When I deleted all the stuff that I didn't want, I avoided the entire list of frequencies under Montgomery county but left the list of TGIDs. So the scanner had nothing to scan. I un-avoided Montgomery county and now seems to be working as I wanted. One baby step forward. Thanks for the help.

 

[drdispatch]

Slowly coming up to speed on trunked systems. When I deleted all the stuff that I didn't want, I avoided the entire list of frequencies under Montgomery county but left the list of TGIDs. So the scanner had nothing to scan. I un-avoided Montgomery county and now seems to be working as I wanted. One baby step forward. Thanks for the help.

Glad you figured it out. First rule of programming a trunked system (or second, or at least in the top ten) is you've got to have at least one site programmed in order to hear any talkgroups.

 

[ofd8001]

As an alternative, you can set your Favorites List so that Location Control is On, being sure your zip code is set. Then the scanner will select the nearest sites.

Unfortunately this still has some of the nearby "stuff". You can Avoid undesired channels with the Avoid button or edit them in Sentinel.

 

[JoeBearcat]

AVOIDing Sites may be better, as when/if you ever update the list all deleted Sites will be re-imported. AVOIDing them will not change much on re-import. Make sure those two Sites are not avoided.

 

[hiegtx]

AVOIDing Sites may be better, as when/if you ever update the list all deleted Sites will be re-imported. AVOIDing them will not change much on re-import. Make sure those two Sites are not avoided.

As long as you do not rename the system in Sentinel, it will not re-append the sites that you have deleted. So, you can append an additional department, but still no need to wade through a sea of previously deleted sites. (I tested this again, just now, to make sure this has not changed.)

If you modify the system's name, then your additional append (of a department) will append all of the sites as well as whatever Department(s) you chose, under the original systems name, in a new system.