Stone County Sheriff's Office Post

[03msc]

The Stone Co SO posted this on their Facebook page this morning:

We have received several complaints from the public about not being able to hear anything on the scanner anymore. We have upgraded our radio systems to analog/digital so that our officers will be able to contact us and the other officers in various parts of the county. The Stone County East Tower frequency is 155.120 if you put that in your scanner you will be able to hear what goes on at the Sheriff's office channel. The west tower is no longer on analog. If you have that programmed into your scanner, lock out that channel out or you will get a chainsaw noise(digital) come across that one. The City police channel is half analog and half digital so if you want to scan that one you will hear that chain saw noise come across that channel. The OES fire channels are not digital they are analog so you should be able to still hear the fire departments on those two channels. I hope this clears things up a bit. We are abiding by the guideline set forth by the FCC on what we can do with our radio systems to make them better for our officers and the public out there.

Is it just me or is some of that misleading? As if they are blaming the FCC for they themselves choosing to switch to a digital, non-monitorable radio type?

You can find their Facebook page yourself by searching for Stone County Sheriffs Office (no apostrophe in Sheriffs).

Thoughts?

 

[INDY72]

OK, and of course the FCC DB is down for maint... GRRR. LOL, once its up again, I will find the repeater set up and get it in the DB guys. Kinda weird they call that East Repeater.... I will check on the data when its up again. And they put wrong freq.. 159.1200 is the input... the output is 155.1900.... Anyway...

 

[davenlr]

If they are upgrading their radio equipment, why didnt they just get on AWIN?

 

[INDY72]

Too expensive to go all out AWIN. They do have access, but not for every person full time currently as far as I understand. The freqs listed in our DB are the correct ones. Modes listed indicate both digital operation in DMR (TRBO), and the analog ops. Not to mention that on the DMR, they can run 2 ops on each frequency at once compared to only 1 on AWIN, and on the analog. The 155.1200 the SO put on FB, was an typo, or just plain not really knowing what they run lol.

 

[03msc]

If they are upgrading their radio equipment, why didnt they just get on AWIN?

I tend to agree. I admit I don't know everything involved in using AWIN but it seems it would make more sense and be more economical to use a system that is existing and working rather than install a new one that may need to be tweaked, etc. But what do I know...

But again I ask...does the statement about "doing what the FCC says" make sense or does it sound misleading? Narrowbanding doesn't equal switching to DMR or NXDN or some other digital system, as far as I know...

 

[davenlr]

(DMR(TRBO) ....crap, back to the encyclopedia. I thought the military had lots of acronyms.

 

[wbswetnam]

I hear a good bit of traffic on the "east" channel of 155.190 MHz, and occasionally on AWIN as well. I wonder if they're going to go with full DMR on the East channel as well.

 

[photoguy2]

Is it just me or is some of that misleading? As if they are blaming the FCC for they themselves choosing to switch to a digital, non-monitorable radio type?
Thoughts?

Yes, that is a bit miss-leading. But I doubt that the person making that post knows what they are talking about, they are just the PR officer, who called over to the radio tech to ask what happened. AND, I think that they deserve brownie points for letting people know what they did, and not just ignoring scanner people, or giving the polite equivalent of screw you.

Heak, at least they did't encrypt.

Matt

 

[INDY72]

(DMR(TRBO) ....crap, back to the encyclopedia. I thought the military had lots of acronyms.

LOL... DMR = Digital Mobile Radio, An set of standards for usage of TDMA Digital (excluding APCO Project 25) on Land Mobile Radio Services. The most common format being Motorola's MotoTRBO (TRBO), though for conventional there are multiple vendors (including iCOM *moving away from the iDAS/NXDN formats in favor of this*). For trunking currently there is only the MotoTRBO solutions for DMR.

DMR is 2 Slot TDMA Digital currently, but is going to go 4 Slot, then eventually 6 Slot.
For deeper explanations see the multiple threads on the subject, as well as wiki articles, and technical papers published on the web.

 

[03msc]

Yes, that is a bit miss-leading. But I doubt that the person making that post knows what they are talking about, they are just the PR officer, who called over to the radio tech to ask what happened. AND, I think that they deserve brownie points for letting people know what they did, and not just ignoring scanner people, or giving the polite equivalent of screw you.

Heak, at least they did't encrypt.

Matt

Yes, I agree! They actually do a good job on their page, using it for informative purposes. I am in a neighboring county so I follow their page just to see what they are saying. If only my county did something like this...