chris8video
Member
Part of the answer depends on where you are at. If you're mobile the answer is different than if you're just at home.
Essentially you just want to program - or have active at any given time - only the towers of which you are within range. Otherwise the scanner is wasting time looking thru towers you can't reach and that's time spent not hearing anyting. A system in this explanation is a tower or couple of towers programmed in conjunction with the Talkgroups.
Optimally I like to have a single tower active for a system from my house location. I'll program 2 to 3 sites for system for my travels and manually activate - deactive as I move around. I program these based on the center of each county....which is where I'll most likely be on any given day.
In a given system - let's just talk VIPER but for any system - you'll program the TalkGroups. For the Highway Patrol I always load every TG they have in every system/site. For the local agencies on VIPER near me I'll program the county TGs for the towers in the system and each surrounding county's TGs.
To the heart of your question - You'll only hear radio traffic from radios that are active on the tower. The county TGs are generally only active in their home area and maybe one tower ajacent to the tower their radio is communicatiing with.
The Highway patrol is a little more spread out and you may hear more troops and districts as troopers all over the state travel and may have a channel active in their radio from a different part of the state as they travel. That one radio can open up that channel on your local tower to hear HP activity from another area.
Right now, for some reason, there's a lot of out of the area SHP traffic bouncing off the newly activated Davidson County site. It's a little annoying honestly because it's so much traffic that I'm not interested in, so I have to lock those out if it becomes too much.
Depending on your scanner you may be limited to how many talkgroups you can put into your system. If that's the case, you can pare down the out of area TGs.
If you're lucky, you may have more than one good tower in your local area that will give you more to listen to if one tower has TG activity the other doesn't.
I also have the luxury of having GPS on my SDS 100 but it's flaky right now for some reason I haven't figured out. The GPS part is awesome the usb connection freaks out the scanner causing it not to charge / work.
When that works I can travel and let the GPS tell the scanner which NC Viper towers to have active and I just have all the TGs in the state programmed and they'll be active as I pass through.
Hope all this helps.
Chris
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