In St Louis County their P25 trunked system (SLATER) used 2 sets of simulcast towers, South and North. Also the next county adjoining is St Charles and they have a tower on the same system. I have all 3 programmed in. As you would expect the south and north towers have all the activity for the county. However when I get to the western side of the county my G4 will attach to the adjoining county tower even though there's no activity on it. As I drive away my G4 will connect to either the south or north tower or sometimes I'll have to switch knob positions and come back for it to connect. Why would the G4 attach to a tower with no activity and ignoring the towers that do? I've since removed the adjoining tower.
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Trunked Simulcast Towers
- Thread starter llzel
- Start date
Just because there is no activity doesn't mean the tower/site isn't broadcasting non-voice information to allow people to affiliate with it if needed or carrying LRRP data. If you are not hearing traffic on it, it is probably not simulcast, which means all towers carry the same traffic.
Are you on the urban north and south and then when you go west switching to St. Charles ? It's quite possible the sites handle different traffic. I usually when I'm that area only listen to the MOSWIN stuff so I'm not really sure what happens on the SLATER system.
The G4 will lock onto the tower with the best signal strength within your programming paramaters. So if you have the system set up to RX all the sites then it will lock on to the site with the strongest signal. If that site has limited traffic on it, the unication device does not care. Its not looking for how busy it is, its looking at signal strength.
Some systems will have primary sites and then smaller ones to fill in gaps which are not designed to carry all the system traffic but only traffic in a small geographic area.
Some systems will have primary sites and then smaller ones to fill in gaps which are not designed to carry all the system traffic but only traffic in a small geographic area.
Yep I found that out at home here when a signal I actually receive here, is off of a site that does not have the traffic I want on it but, it's for some reason much stronger here. (at least on one side of my house). While adding multiple sites has it's place and I use it often I do have knob positions for various things I use here at home.
I have Urban south 1001, urban north 1002 and St Charles 1003 programmed as SLATER Towers. Today good example, driving I64 west to St Charles as I got close to St Charles Co the G4 went 1003 and silent. I got to St Charles and when I left it locked on to urban south 1002 in St Charles, weird So I'll remove the St Charles SLATER tower and solve that issue. I didn't realize it locked on the strongest signal without traffic...but I understand now.
It doesn’t really lock on to the strongest site, it locks on to a site with an acceptable decode quality… which may typically be the strongest signal. But once it finds a good signal, it doesn’t keep looking to see if there is a better signal. Then it keeps on this site until the decode deteriorates.
tvengr
Well Known Member
The solution is to set up 3 separate systems in 3 different knob positions. The first system will use the St Louis Co South site. The second system will use the St Louis Co North site. The third system will use the St Charles Co site. You will be able to manually select any of the 3 sites by changing knob positions.
Yes sorry I didn't word my post correctly. At times you can switch knob positions and it "may" find a different site but not always. The Unications are great devices but it's worth it to put some time into the programming. At least that's been my experience here.
This, exactly this. I tried on the IL side with Starcom 21 some shortcuts (and when traveling state wide they at least work) but, for my home area I had to specify what I wanted. When I did several sites in one position at home, I ran into issues.
tvengr
Well Known Member
That is why you need to put only a single site into each knob position and change sites by changing knob positions.
And for at home that's exactly what I did. Have another zone and Channel positions for traveling and thus far they've worked well.
Project25_MASTR
Millennial Graying OBT Guy
What confuses people is how simulcast actually functions. Logically a simulcast system (prime site with sub-sites) is logically only a single site (look at your Site ID's next time you are playing with it). If you build an additional labor and/or split your prime sites into multiple geographically different systems each of those is a new logical site ID (i.e North is Site 1, South Site 2, etc) even though they can physically consists a dozen or so physical sites each. Now because of how affiliation works, just because traffic is carried on one site doesn't mean it is carried on the other (if no one is affiliated on a specific talkgroup for a site traffic won't be carried to said site). Since a simulcast layer operates as a single logical site...all of the traffic is carried across the layer.
Why is simulcast not built everywhere? Sometimes cost is a factor as simulcast requires more equipment (such as GPSDOs and specialty low latency interconnection between sites). Sometimes it was a technical limitation (i.e. a filler site could get an adequate network connection to meet the latency requirements, vendor had not yet build simulcast for a certain application and chose to go with a safer multi-site/wide-area approach instead of use the customer as a beta tester, a filler site only need to handle minimal traffic so justifying the additional equipment to match existing simulcast did not make sense).
Why is simulcast not built everywhere? Sometimes cost is a factor as simulcast requires more equipment (such as GPSDOs and specialty low latency interconnection between sites). Sometimes it was a technical limitation (i.e. a filler site could get an adequate network connection to meet the latency requirements, vendor had not yet build simulcast for a certain application and chose to go with a safer multi-site/wide-area approach instead of use the customer as a beta tester, a filler site only need to handle minimal traffic so justifying the additional equipment to match existing simulcast did not make sense).
I would program a knob position for the South and North simulcast cells combined, and a second knob for the St. Charles site.
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