Starcom Monitoring

[ahopp93]

I just purchased a BCD325P2. It is my understanding that if anyone is using starcom it should transmit throughout the entire state and I should be able to monitor it on my local site. Is this correct? If not, how can I find out what talk groups are on my site and which talk groups use which site.

 

[jaspence]

I was in Illinois last week and did some listening, mostly Lake county. I used a Whistler 1080 set to cover all traffic in the county, and didn't hear anything that wasn't local. It is highly unlikely that every tower has the ability to carry all of the talk groups. Most likely there are talk groups set for cross county comms as a system that carried everything would be unmanageable. The thing I ran into was that some areas are using encryption, and there were still analog dispatches being used regularly. Use the RR database to look up your areas of interest.

 

[N9PBD]

The only time you'll hear traffic from outside of your local area on STARCOM21 is if someone from outside affiliates with one of your local towers, using their talkgroup. Like @jaspence said, adjacent areas will probably be on your local tower(s), such as Madison county being heard on the St. Clair county simulcast system, but we don't hear Springfield units, etc., down here.

 

[kruser]

I just purchased a BCD325P2. It is my understanding that if anyone is using starcom it should transmit throughout the entire state and I should be able to monitor it on my local site. Is this correct? If not, how can I find out what talk groups are on my site and which talk groups use which site.

If you allowed every user to be heard across the entire state, there would be no channels left for anyone to talk on!
There are exceptions to this rule but most system admins limit each user to only be able to affiliate with the towers in their local home area.
This is how most statewide systems will be setup. There are ways to allow a user to be heard across the entire state but it would rarely ever be done simply because it could use all of the resources of a system.

 

[kevino]

I just purchased a BCD325P2. It is my understanding that if anyone is using starcom it should transmit throughout the entire state and I should be able to monitor it on my local site. Is this correct? If not, how can I find out what talk groups are on my site and which talk groups use which site.

A fairly small percentage of SC21 talkgroups are "Statewide" talkgroups (i.e. transmitted over every site in the system). The majority of talkgroups, however, require a system radio on a particular talk group to be currently affiliated with a site to be heard on that site. Hope that helps.