WS1080: Spotsylvania Scanning

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kk4wpr

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I bought a WS1080 a couple years ago when Spotsy moved to the current system but I have had little luck receiving anything from my home near Snell. I can usually pick up the State police here but nothing from Spotsy. If I drive a couple of miles from my house towards Thornburg or Livingston I start to hear Spotsy dispatches. A couple of weekends ago I built an 850 MHz J-pole and shoved it about 20 feet in the air but still nothing from Spotsy although the State Police came in a little better. Could I be in that much of a dead zone here that I can't hear the Thornburg tower that is about 5 miles away? My old analog Radio Shack trunk tracker worked great here before the switch. Or could there be a setting on my scanner that has lowered the sensitivity with regards to Spotsylvania? Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom, KK4WPR
 

fredva

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Tom, you may be suffering from digital simulcast distortion. Spotsy's system is a simulcast system. Each transmission will go out on the same frequency from multiple towers, and if you are in a bad spot, the signals from two or more towers will arrive at your scanner out of sync and will cause a garbling voice, or no digital decoding will take place at all (silence). If simulcast distortion is the problem, a directional antenna can help by isolating the signal you receive to one tower. There are cell phone directional antennas for the 800 mhz range that are sold on Amazon for around $15, or you could build one.

I have a WS-1080. It works well on listening to the state police, but Spotsylvania's system is spotty.
 

kk4wpr

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That might explain why my scanner receives Spotsy if I drive a mile or two from my house in any direction. I am going to whip up a 3 element yagi and give it a try.

Thanks
 

Dafe1er

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I bought a WS1080 a couple years ago when Spotsy moved to the current system but I have had little luck receiving anything from my home near Snell. I can usually pick up the State police here but nothing from Spotsy. If I drive a couple of miles from my house towards Thornburg or Livingston I start to hear Spotsy dispatches. A couple of weekends ago I built an 850 MHz J-pole and shoved it about 20 feet in the air but still nothing from Spotsy although the State Police came in a little better. Could I be in that much of a dead zone here that I can't hear the Thornburg tower that is about 5 miles away? My old analog Radio Shack trunk tracker worked great here before the switch. Or could there be a setting on my scanner that has lowered the sensitivity with regards to Spotsylvania? Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom, KK4WPR
Also make sure you have updated your Spotsy folder as they had a couple channel changes recently.
 

kk4wpr

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I updated them last week but it is easy enough to do it again.
I have a question about the display: what does a blinking white S with a black background (instead of T for trunking) mean? I don't see that S in the manual.
Thanks
 

Dafe1er

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I updated them last week but it is easy enough to do it again.
I have a question about the display: what does a blinking white S with a black background (instead of T for trunking) mean? I don't see that S in the manual.
Thanks


I believe it is as follows:

S - appears when the squelch circuit is open.

T - blinks when the scanner is receiving a trunking control channel frequency
 

kk4wpr

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Well I built a 9 element 850 MHz Yagi and have it in my attic pointed at Thornburg but I am still not picking anything up. I have Broadcastify on right now and it is jumping but nothing on my scanner. Could there be some simple setting on my scanner that I am overlooking?

Thanks850mhzbeam1.jpg
 

N4VKF

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kk4wpr

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I used a couple online calculators (such as Yagi Uda Antenna (Rothammel)) to spec out the yagi and I also have desktop version. The feed line center conductor and the shield are each soldered to one leg of the dipole. I've built these before with pvc pipe for 2 meters but the wood was handy. Yes the reflector and directors are electrically isolated from the boom.
I was thinking that Thornburg was the closest but now looking at a map, Red Hill or Brokenburg look closer as the crow flies. I'll try those locations tonight.

Thanks.
 

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N4VKF

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I was just thinking that maybe your age and p25 threshold and delay settings may need to be adjusted

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dlwtrunked

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Keep in mind that the only non-encrypted are most fire/rescue, schools, and utilities (almost all sheriff groups are encrypted) so (except when schools buses are running) there may be a long time between clear transmissions and you must make sure yu have those appropriate groups enabled. Also, on simulcast, sometimes a "worse" antenna will work better...one that you can block in directions of competing signals.
 

kk4wpr

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Here is an update. No matter how I positioned or pointed my antenna at my house, my scanner would never pick up anything more than an occasional garble. However, in parallel with this effort I purchased a Raspberry Pi3 and a RTL-SDR dongle to build an sdr scanner as described in John's Tech Blog. Well last night I got it working and it receives wonderfully. I listened to the tail end of a fire call last night around 9pm. It is still strewn all over my work bench and needs to be packaged into something my wife start and stop without learning Linux but this looks like my path forward. BTW I actually got to to this point by reading fredva's tagline. This is a great site!
 

fredva

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Here is an update. No matter how I positioned or pointed my antenna at my house, my scanner would never pick up anything more than an occasional garble. However, in parallel with this effort I purchased a Raspberry Pi3 and a RTL-SDR dongle to build an sdr scanner as described in John's Tech Blog. Well last night I got it working and it receives wonderfully. I listened to the tail end of a fire call last night around 9pm. It is still strewn all over my work bench and needs to be packaged into something my wife start and stop without learning Linux but this looks like my path forward. BTW I actually got to to this point by reading fredva's tagline. This is a great site!

That's cool! It's just unfortunate that a more expensive scanner doesn't receive as well.
 

kk4wpr

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Spotsylvania, VA
My Raspberry RTL-SDR scanner has been working well with one exception. It appears that Spotsylvania keeps changing the control channel. Is that true? When I first setup the scanner the control channel seemed to be 852.400 as per gqrx. A few days later when I started the scanner I had to change to 851.6125. The next time it was back to 852.400. Is this common practice for Spotsy's system? Can OP25 be configured to scan multiple control channels at the same time?
 

BM82557

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My Raspberry RTL-SDR scanner has been working well with one exception. It appears that Spotsylvania keeps changing the control channel. Is that true? When I first setup the scanner the control channel seemed to be 852.400 as per gqrx. A few days later when I started the scanner I had to change to 851.6125. The next time it was back to 852.400. Is this common practice for Spotsy's system? Can OP25 be configured to scan multiple control channels at the same time?

Looks like it is a Harris system (they routinely change CC)

DB has all freqs listed as CC's

Screenshot - 5_25_2019 , 13_43_45.pngScreenshot - 5_25_2019 , 13_44_00.png
 

fredva

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Can OP25 be configured to scan multiple control channels at the same time?

Yes. I believe it is a comma-separated list. I'll look at my file to double-check that when I get the chance. I know I have all of the frequencies programmed in because the system does rotate the cc. I believe the software - at least the version I'm using - will check each frequency in the list until it finds the cc, stays with it until it is no longer the cc, then goes through the list to find the new cc.
 
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fredva

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I confirmed that it is a comma-separated list of frequencies in the control channel frequency column. Should look like "851.25,851.6125,852.4,853.1...."
 
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