The best of Close Call, at least for me.

[RidingDownUnder]

True story. I was using CC on another brand portable with a 1-2” antenna and was scanning in the 460-512mhz band. I was standing outside Westfields shopping center which is the biggest shopping center in Australia in all state. I lock onto a hit and heard 2 guy’s talking to each other and following a guy in the shopping centre. Anyway I worked out where these guy’s were following this guy so I walked to the area while still CC receiving. I then heard 1 guy say, “OK, l‘ll grab him when he just gets outside the store. Low and behold about 10 feet from me these 2 guy’s grabbed this other guy who had shopping bags with him while he just stepped foot outside the shopping centre mall and a scuffle broke out. It turned out he was stealing from a department store and the 2 Loss Prevention Agent’s were tailing him while on their 2-way radio and I received it all on CC mode on my radio. This is why I love scanning.

f using CC in a situation like this or simular, I found using the lowest gain or even a out of band antenna for best in close contacts.

 

[pb_lonny]

Nice work, I am also a huge fan of CloseCall.

 

[Ubbe]

I was using CC on another brand portable with a 1-2” antenna and was scanning in the 460-512mhz band.

It's a bit unclear what technique you used. Close Call are Unidens way of finding an unknown frequency in 1-2 seconds if the signal are much stronger than others in the air as it is using a frequency counter. Whistler are using a search system that are much more depending of low level signals and could take 5sec or more but will slow down to a crawl if the signal levels are generally too high from the antenna that will constantly trigger the much slower finer step search mode.

But you mentioned you where using CC on another brand portable and you where also scanning the 460-512MHz band.

/Ubbe

 

[RidingDownUnder]

from the 536’s manual.

CLOSE CALL
Your scanner’s Close Call feature lets you set the scanner so it detects, alerts you to, and displays the frequency of a nearby strong radio transmission.


The portable was a little Yaesu 2m/70cm portable with wide band receive and had a option similar to CC. Sorry I can’t remember what it was called. I’m sure the option just adds a high amount of attenuation to the receiver. This was a long time ago. I live in Sydney Australia and our main conventional commercial UHF frequencies are between 450-512MHz that’s why I enjoy CC around those frequencies. FYI, our trunking systems are located between 406-425MHz and our NSW police police system is located in the 468.000MHz, P25 phase 1 fully encrypted digital non trunking.

Thanks Anthony.

 

[dave3825]

I think Yaesu has a feature called Smart Search that does a scan and automatically inserts found freqs into a bank.

 

[radionx]

"2 Loss Prevention Agent’s were tailing him while on their 2-way radio"
Yep, and that's why decoding of DMR DCDM is important in scanners. Why? LPA are a typical application for DCDM systems...as are e.g. bouncers in front of a night club. Close call will have a hard time catching these ~30ms DMR DCDM bursts...

LPA comms are like a LE TAC: "Interesting"

 

[Ubbe]

Smart Search seems to be like Unidens Discovery mode where it scans a frequency range in normal speed and receiver gain and stores every squelch detected frequency to a memory bank but in one Smart Search mode you could also listen to the frequency. Then you'll need to use attenuation and an antenna that does not receive much to have it find only nearby local transmissions.

One problem could be that Yaesu has a very slow search rate more suitable to find continous carriers from a repeater. Maybe the Mall had a repeater system that made it possible for their users to talk to each other intependent of where they where.

/Ubbe

 

[pb_lonny]

My record is about 3.5km, for logging a 50W UHF repeater via CloseCall.

 

[redbeard]

"2 Loss Prevention Agent’s were tailing him while on their 2-way radio"
Yep, and that's why decoding of DMR DCDM is important in scanners. Why? LPA are a typical application for DCDM systems...as are e.g. bouncers in front of a night club. Close call will have a hard time catching these ~30ms DMR DCDM bursts...

LPA comms are like a LE TAC: "Interesting"

OP was using a Yaesu 2m/70cm portable so DCDM played no part in this. Frankly I don't even see the connection between an obscure digtal voice mode and bouncing or loss prevention. Every instance I've ever monitored both of those uses has been analog FM.

While I support more modes and features from our scanner manufacturers, tying them to these uses seems like fantasy and not reality. No club owner I've ever interacted with is looking for a more expensive way to do what already works. Same with retail LP, just look at Walmart who wouldn't even license their own freqs to save money.

 

[Ubbe]

My record is about 3.5km, for logging a 50W UHF repeater via CloseCall.

I was at a site that only used VHF and close called a UHF frequency, my own repeater, that I had line of sight to and it was 14,5km away. I think I used the UBC3500XLT at that time. The transmit antenna had +50dBm E.R.P. and the attenuation thru air are 100dB so receive level was -50dBm which probably are the lowest possible signal for close call when there are no other interference.

/Ubbe