Mike,
I agree with everything Wally said, and would like to add the following...
I have my scanner up and running for Wasatch County and Heber City for the things I like to listen to but....I often drive up Daniels Canyon and up to the Strawberry Res. area. When I do I lose reception of WCSO even though I know their radios work up there... So, do I just need to add the control channels for that area in the same group as I have the Wasatch Simulcast 852.46250c?
YES, that would be the quickest, easiest, and take up the least room in your scanner. The only downside is the answers to your next questions...
If I added "Daniels Canyon 853.91250c" to the group will my scanner be "fighting" between the Simulcast and the Canyon when I'm in an area that those two might bleed over each other?
YES, it will, but we need to know what scanner you have in order to say what it would really do. I own a GRE but very seldom use it. I have several Unidens. If I remember correctly, with the GRE you set some threshold for signal strength to tell the GRE when to look for a stronger CC. That way it only uses 1 CC at a time (the strongest one) for a given system. (corrections from GRE guys are welcome.)
With the newest Unidens you can add multiple sites to any system, along with all the talkgroups for that system. You could have 1 site for Wasatch Simulcast, 1 for Daniels, 1 for Strawberry, 1 for Clayton, 1 for Lewis Pk, and so on, all in the same system and therefore all using the same list of TG's. The only downside here is that your scanner will spend 1 second on each scan cycle for every CC it can detect, even if there is no traffic on that site. (If there is no CC detected for that site it will only spend a fraction of a second looking for the CC, then move on.) It is also easy to add a Quick-Key to any site to enable and disable it anytime you want.
If they don't conflict with each other can I just add all of the "Wasatch" control channels and I'll get it wherever I am within that area without having to switch things around on the radio?
In my older Unidens I do exactly what you said. Since they only allow 1 site per system, I add all the CC's to the single site named 'Wasatch Area'. The scanner will hold on to a given CC as long as it can hear it, then it will look for a new one. To me this seems similar to the GRE's in that it will only hear 1 CC at a time for that system. The frustrating part for me in this scenario (whether GRE or older Uniden) is that I don't know for sure when the scanner lost one CC and then found a new one. In other words, I only get to hear 1 site at a time, and most of the time while traveling I don't know for sure which site it is. The older Uniden (unlike the GRE) will hang on to that CC as long as it can hear it, even if there is a stronger CC now available. However, when that old CC drops out even for a moment, the scanner will look for another from the list and then hang on to it.
With ANY scanner in a trunking system, you need to know this: If there is someone in Heber having a conversation, but you are near Strawberry and there is no one with a Ucan radio set to that channel and connected to or 'affiliated' with the Strawberry site, you will waste 1 second scanning Strawberry when the conversation is not even present on that site. In other words, the Ucan Trunking system
does not know or care that
YOU are near that site wanting to hear the WCSO channel, it only cares if there is a
UCAN RADIO near enough to be affiliated with that site
and that radio is set to the WCSO channel. Make sense? Just a heads up so you aren't too frustrated when you hear much less traffic on Daniels and Strawberry than you do in the valley, no matter which scanner you have. On the other hand, if Strawberry or Daniels is the ONLY site you can get for the moment, that's far better than nothing, so why not listen anyway.
--bc
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