John thanks for the reply my scanner is programed to all 9 sites plus outside agency and lake callboxes the only two I receive is sheriff southeast , southwest . Yesterday went to ham radio outlet talked to scanner Jim he checked my scanner and said that the new m c s o radio system has many sites that are now encrypted and it will not be as active as before thezonaman 9/29/19
It's not the sites that are encrypted, it's talkgroups that are.
The new Maricopa County (not MCSO, it doesn't belong exclusively to the Sheriff's Office) system is not setup the same way the old system was. For MCSO, possibly the biggest user of the County's system, all of the main talkgroups on the old system were carried full time on the 3 main sites: White Tanks in the West Valley, Thompson Peak in the Northeast Valley, and the Central Courts site in downtown Phoenix. From these 3 sites, you could hear almost everything Valley-wide, with a few exceptions, such as the special detail talkgroups, which only affiliated with the closest site. (For example, if you wanted to listen to deputies working at Chase Field during Diamondbacks home games, you had to be able to hear the Central Courts site. You couldn't listen to them on the White Tanks or Thompson Peak sites.)
With the new system, however, you won't hear both the West Valley district 2 and district 3 talkgroups on sites located in the East Valley, and you won't hear all of the East Valley districts on the White Tanks (if any at all). The talkgroups are now segregated by region, East or West. You have to be able to adequately receive both an East Valley site that carries all of the East Valley districts (or maybe 2 separate East Valley sites if no one site carries districts 1, 4, 6 and 7, as well as districts 5 and 8, plus Central dispatch), and a West Valley site to hear the 2 West Valley districts.
And the Central Valley sites such as Phoenix Downtown, Anthem/New River, and North County don't carry all of the talkgroups from both the East Valley and West Valley districts, either.
So, there are fewer talkgroups in the clear, and the way the system has been designed has made it harder to hear them all from one location, like we used to be able to with the old system. We have to adapt to the new system, and make the best of it.
A rooftop antenna will make it easier to receive distant sites, and will become more important the farther East or West you are from the opposite side of the Valley. That is an added expense, and may not always be feasible for some, for other reasons such as HOA restrictions. In some cases, we may have to accept that we simply won't be able to hear all of the districts all of the time anymore.
John
Peoria
