TxDOT Upgrading Radios

[Project25_MASTR]

I happened to wander into the district 5 radio shop to talk to a fellow ham last week (and to follow up on a rumor I heard about a bunch of vertex radios getting ready for surplus) and learned something interesting. Turns out that TxDOT is upgrading to Motorola XTL2500's. Got to see a master codeplug while I was there. 29 zones, 25 of which are by district. The remaining 4 zones are noaa weather channels, portable repeaters, interop and every dps repeater in the state.

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[LonnyHillin]

Very interesting, thanks. Do you have any information, by chance, on the dismantling of the TXDOT tower that was previously located at the I-10 rest area near Fabens, Texas in El Paso County? The tower had been there for many years and was recently removed, perhaps it may be related to the pending upgrade.

 

[nd5y]

Many years ago TXDOT began moving everything from low band to high band. They installed dual mode P25/NFM high band repeaters in most parts of the state. They built new towers for many of them. Apparently many or all of them are VoIP networked. Around here all the older towers still have low band antennas even though none of the vehicles have them and the low band licenses were cancelled or expired. Maybe they don't want to spend the money to remove them yet.

A few years ago here in the northern part of the state I noticed two more new towers but there were no new FCC licenes for the new locations. The one near where I live now has an active repeater on it that was moved without being licensed properly.

Within the past year or so here in the Wichita Falls area some of the vehicles started accidently using P25 occasionally on some of the repeaters around here about the same time that they started using 100.0 PL on the simplex channels 151.025, 151.055, 151.085 and 156.135. Also in the past year I heard the Wichita Falls DPS dispatcher show up on the Wichia Falls TXDOT repeater a couple times. I wan't able to tell if they were getting into it via RF or a console VoIP connection.

I created a google earth file of all the TXDOT licenses and If I remember right there were some more licenses with towers that were dismantled. I don't remember if Fabens was one of them. El Paso and Hudspeth counties have had some 800 MHz repeaters licensed for a long time but I don't know if those are really used. I don't think they are even in the database. There is a lot of stuff in the El Paso area that isn't in the database.

In the Dallas district for some reason they went to Nextel instead of high band repeaters like most of the rest of the state. Last year they applied for some licenses for DMR repeaters in Dallas and the surrounding counties in that district. The FCC rejected most them because they were not coordinated properly and they haven't reapplied again in almost a year. There is no telling what they might do next.

 

[TLF82]

You should grab a copy of that codeplug. I'd love to use some of their I to to drop into my XTL and XTS.