Looks like I have 4 or 5 sites within 8 miles of my home,I was watiching a guy on Youtube with a Uniden SRS 100 scanning in the St Paul Minnesota area 35 miles out and he was using a rubber duck antenna and it was working fine,there is no excuse why I cant get 2 or 3 miles with all the antennas I tried unless my scanner has a problem..but again..I pick up the Highway Patrol all over the state and city loud and clear
You're comparing apples to oranges.
St. Paul and Minneapolis are on Minnesota's
ARMER system. Besides the City Center simulcast, there are two others for Hennepin County and another simulcast for N. Minneapolis. If the person on YouTube is 35 miles outside of the city center, but with a location and antenna system where one of the simulcasts can be heard, he or she is far enough out that the distortion from multiple sites is not a factor. Here in my area, there are a number of trunked systems in use, where simulcast issues have been reported. However, at my specific location, I'm far enough away that, while I can still hear the system, simulcast does not affect me. At a distance, the sites farthest away from me are not in range, so I'm left with one or two that are in range, but close enough together that I don't see the timing differences in reception that cause distortion in a number of scanners.
You can hear the Highway Patrol as they are not on your county's system. Instead, they are on
KSICS, which has has a single site (transmitter location) in the county. So, no simulcast issue at all,
I had the discone in the attic,no good and then bought a yagi and mounted it outside and got some calls but nothing like I should get and then I took the discone out of the attic and mounted it outside and got very little.Theres a guy streaming his scanner from downtown on broadcastify and when I listen to his scanner its getting 10 times the number of calls I ever got.
There's no notation on the feed info as to what the provider is using for reception. He may have one of the SDS series scanners, a "real" radio (like a Motorola), or is using one or more of the SDR dongles & software to provide the audio. It's also possible that he or she is close enough to that center of the city tower that it blanks out the out of phase signals from the other sites used for simulcast. That's likely what's happening to you when you start hearing more radio traffic when you drive towards downtown. The signal from the center site overides the reception from the more distant sites.
The yagi was outside all the time and it worked ok but not like it should and then last week the police calls I was getting on Simulcast from WPD stopped but still got HP calls..I took the PL259 off and redone the connection and checked coax with a multimeter and looks good.
As I noted above, the HP is on a different system, which is not using a simulcast site.
With a yagi (directional antenna), you don't necessarily aim at the closest site. If you are more or less west to southwest of the city center, if you aimed a yagi at the city center site, there are two other, more distant sites, behind it, so that may not be of help. Look at the map.
I'm guessing that maybe you are in the vicinity of the blue circle. If you aim the yagi at the center site, you see the two others, at different distances, behind it. While you may increase the signal from the center, you also are increasing the strength of the sites behind it.
I suspect that a better move would be to aim towards the site circled in red. You don't have background sites to add to the signal mix if pointed that way. Of course, a yagi is not a viable option when mobile.
