Thanksgiving weirdness

[jeatock]

Did my towers magically get a thousand feet tall and my multicoupler preamps go from 2.5 to 100 db gain yesterday, or is the ducting and atmosphere wacky?

I'm in West Central Illinois. Last night one of my local 154 MHz channels was covered up by fire traffic from Plainwell, Michigan. Verified the address and two cross streets on Google maps. This morning my personal 396 was locked on the 800 MHz Starcom control site 102 (Chicago, 300 miles away) with full tight squelch, four bars and readable traffic. I had to lock out quite a few sites from all over eastern and northern Illinois to get back to my local 238 tower.

My own VHF repeaters on the local public safety system were equally useless for parts of yesterday.

Weirdness. Anyone else seeing this or am I the lucky one?

 

[FFPM571]

Not unusual.. With the warmer than average weather and a cold front moving in soon It happens.

 

[PMSCAN]

You are not alone .... here in Grand Rapids,MI we have had interference on a VHF Sheriff channel. Best guess on source is Forest County in NE Wisconsin ... same output freq and tone ...

 

[jeatock]

I keep an eye on the ducting maps and have had problems with my VHF system before, but not like this. And I have never had the 800 MHz system wack out this way.

 

[desert-cheetah]

Wow, that's pretty cool you were picking up traffic from so far away! I've never experienced anything quite like that, but sometimes the weather and whether or not there's clouds will affect what I might pick up.

 

[jeatock]

Wow, that's pretty cool you were picking up traffic from so far away! I've never experienced anything quite like that, but sometimes the weather and whether or not there's clouds will affect what I might pick up.

Both cool and annoying. I administer my county's public safety system and got several messages asking me who the foreign voices were and wanting me to make them stop. Some folks just don't understand.

 

[kb2vxa]

Yeah, while it may be cool for scanner listeners but it can range from annoying to hazardous on a PS system. It's unusual to hear "foreign" stations but it happens when they're using the same PL/NAC by sheer chance. Mostly stronger signals blank locals by overriding them while not being heard, then users wonder what went wrong with their radios.

Our famous coastal ducting has been a problem for the Ocean County trunked T Band system since day one. The FCC never licensed such systems in a TV market area which has a station in that band, all well and good neither NY nor Philadelphia has one but when TV comes in from Boston and/or Washington the system gets swamped. That will be resolved sooner or later since the FCC mandated PS leave the band, OC has a slew of 460-470MHz channels yet unused but that's where they're going to. Meanwhile I hear NYPD loud and clear when there is an opening, stand by for Turf Wars Phase 2. (;->)