TRX-1: Talkgroup keeps going silent.........

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shajoe44

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There is one talkgroup, my favorite, that keeps going "silent" after a few hours. It sometimes takes hours for it to happen but it is happening more and more. I have other scanners going so I know it's not on their end. I have to press menu, then press scan again and then the talkgroup can be heard again. I think someone before said that my SD card my be going bad. Is anyone else having this problem? I have 3 scanlists being monitored. A P25 system, and conventional VHF system and a DMR system. Thanks
 

DJ11DLN

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If that's the only one going silent I wouldn't strongly suspect a card. I did notice one of my Whistlers intermittently going deaf across the board for a few weeks before a card unloaded itself. If I hit WX and then back to Scan it seemed to bring it back to life. But cards are cheap and you should have a spare anyway so I'd go ahead and obtain one, load it up, and give it a try. You never know.
 

jonwienke

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It could be the card. If the data for the talkgroup has a sector going bad, the read error triggered when the scanner looks up the talkgroup info could bork the scanner in all sorts of unexpected ways.
 

CycleSycho

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It could be the card. If the data for the talkgroup has a sector going bad, the read error triggered when the scanner looks up the talkgroup info could bork the scanner in all sorts of unexpected ways.



:) When something loads into memory, and is reading correctly to 'monitor' , I do not see it re-reading anything to monitor again. The SD card writes to the scanner, once loaded if corrupt, it is corrupted until corrected. So, once receiving from loading itself into its pre-operation, seems to me it is there & not a of 'source' error in data. Hope you find the problem but if it is working when turned on I do not believe it is an SD card problem. :)


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shajoe44

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That's the part I don't understand about the scanner. I don't know if it uses the card like you mention during scanning or not. I am kind of like you, I would think everything is loaded into the scanner. It's a fairly active TG, so if I don't hear anything after about 15 or 20 mins I just go thru the process of menu-scan and it reappears.
 

Spitfire8520

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If you are monitoring a large trunked radio system with a lot of sites (i.e. Palmetto 800), you may want to read up on affiliation as that may be a factor in your ability to monitor specific talkgroups. If a talkgroup is not used by many radios in an area, it may appear and disappear regularly from the sites in the area.

Something that I dislike about the current Whistler scanners is that it tries to think that it is smarter than the user, so simplifies multi-site operations to where it locks onto what it thinks is the best decoding site and sticks to that site until it determines that the decode is not good enough. What could be potentially happening is that when you first turn the scanner on, it locks onto a site that does carry the talkgroup you want to listen to, but then it switches to a different site that does not have your talkgroup. It could also be related to radios switching sites and are therefore no longer being affiliated to the site that the scanner was sitting on.

One thing you can try is to program the talkgroup into multiple systems each having only a single site that the talkgroup can be found into the same scanlist. This forces the scanner to routinely scan through each of these "systems" for that talkgroup instead of locking onto the first site it determines as having a good decode.
 

shajoe44

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Not sure that is the case here. The talkgroup is the nearest Public Safety Dept to me. About 5 miles away. The site is their main site and it's 3 miles away. But I do occasionally see on the display a site show up that is 25 miles away from me but it usually will return the the local site 3 miles away. I have my scanner set up to show site location being broadcast. But like you said it could be hung up on that distant site and I wouldn't know it.
 

DJ11DLN

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Not sure that is the case here. The talkgroup is the nearest Public Safety Dept to me. About 5 miles away. The site is their main site and it's 3 miles away. But I do occasionally see on the display a site show up that is 25 miles away from me but it usually will return the the local site 3 miles away. I have my scanner set up to show site location being broadcast. But like you said it could be hung up on that distant site and I wouldn't know it.
I have sites 5 and 9 miles respectively from me. When programming my system with both of those (and a number of other) sites so I can use the radio mobile without fiddling with it, as often as not it latches onto the 9-mile site at home and refuses to let go of it. I now have multiple copies of my system in V-Scanner folders, each built around a single site. If you can force it to latch onto the site you desire that way, it should answer some questions for you.

But radio affiliations affect the system and that's out of your control. If a user radio affiliates with your site, it will bring its TG's along with it and if those are in your interest, you hear what you want. But unless those TG's are locked to that site, once the radio moves away and affils with another site, you are SOL.
 

Wackyracer

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Use windows error checking to attempt to fix the card, check off both boxes, if it says failed, replace the card ,if it says it fixed some errors use .ezscan to prepare the card.
 

Ubbe

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The scanner initially loads just the basic data from the SD card, the frequency and the mode like AM FM subtones and if it's digital. When it scans and the mode matches and lets say it also detects TG 5 in digital mode, then it reads additional data from the card like name tags and delay and all associated data to that to be able to determine if it should monitor the call or skip it. If it gets bad data from the card in that last step it probably don't know what to do and skips the call as it cannot display a proper name tag to set the delay time and so on. If the firmware code where written in the most user friendly way it should assume that you would like to monitor it and set default values as if it where a wild card. Or display SD card read error information and continue. The current firmware could be improved in many ways.

Inexperianced program coders often assume that everything works perfect, never any problems with SD cards, never any errors in the received data from a system. But you always have to use error traps for each section of the code "Taking too long time to write to SD card" Too many data errors received from control channel" Unknown data received and debug file started, send file to Whistler". Every problem should be captured and presented to the user. EZ-Scan could have a function where you connect the USB cable in serial mode and transfer a file with the errors and a dump of all CPU and DSP registers and stack.

/Ubbe
 
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