West Seneca is going to Saia Net

Wackyracer

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is west Seneca fire moving to the new system? Or staying on the uhf system
In the RR database someone added fire dispatch, as of this morning, the are still using analog. The town board meeting I only heard them approve a saianet subscription for PD.

IMO: that means EACH FD would have to approve the purchase of new radios at the very least in order to use the saianet system, assuming they do not already have the proper Connect plus DMR radios.
 

wqhz937

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I understand the FDs keeping analog on patch not only for interoperability, but also I believe the voice pagers are analog only as well, with no DMR alternative. Unless the volunteer departments’ trust in IAmResponding is growing enough to ditch the Minitors.

Please correct me if I’m wrong...I made the switch from volunteer firefighter to fire buff over ten years ago now, so I’m definitely out of the loop.
 

lkas

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I am starting to record unit id. if anyone else has a list they created and want to swap files let me know
 

GTR8000

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Curious, what does unit ID help with?
People like to label them in the scanner/software like DSD+/SDRTrunk so they know which unit is transmitting. Pretty common practice, there are scores of UID lists in the RR wiki for various systems.

NEXEDGE is nice in that it has the ability to broadcast the aliases over the air, and DSD+ will decode them on the fly. Motorola ASTRO 25 systems of more recent vintage can also encode the aliases that are in Provisioning Manager, however the encoding is proprietary and only the APX series with a particular software option can decode them. Still very handy not to have to maintain a UCL, which gets very tedious very quickly.
 

Trbogeek

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People like to label them in the scanner/software like DSD+/SDRTrunk so they know which unit is transmitting. Pretty common practice, there are scores of UID lists in the RR wiki for various systems.

NEXEDGE is nice in that it has the ability to broadcast the aliases over the air, and DSD+ will decode them on the fly. Motorola ASTRO 25 systems of more recent vintage can also encode the aliases that are in Provisioning Manager, however the encoding is proprietary and only the APX series with a particular software option can decode them. Still very handy not to have to maintain a UCL, which gets very tedious very quickly.
Ahh, makes sense.
 

Rabid716

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Has anyone tried listening to WSPD on the new SaiaNet system using a cheap DMR rather than a scanner?

If so, do you continuously scan all of the non-control Seneca Tower SaiaNet frequencies from the RRDB (#s 424.900 / 424.6625 / 424.575 / 424.5625 / 424.675) against the WSPD talk group list (#s 513701/513702/513706)? With a DMR I'm assuming that there would be no benefit to scan the control channel frequencies but I am not certain.

Since this is a trunked system I'm assuming that, based on how busy the radio traffic is, transmission can occur and randomly hop on any one of the 5 above frequencies, would this be correct? Or are you guys finding that WSPD is only on one of these Seneca Tower channels?

Any tips/recommendations for a novice/budget user would be much appreciated. Thank you! :)
 

BTFire21

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Go buy a Rtl dongle and Dsd+ . It's going to be nearly impossible to scan and follow a Convo using a standard radio.
 

GTR8000

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Con+ systems will rotate talkgroups around the available traffic channels. Keep in mind that DMR/MOTOTRBO is TDMA, which means that both slots are in play. This may also include the second slot of the control channel, which can be configured to carry voice and/or data. Trying to scan Con+ systems using a conventional method is often a bit of a mess and less than ideal.
 

weweber1991

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There have been no official communications of switching WSFD over to Saianet as of right now. There are talks of upgrading infrastructure (Antennas, tuning up repeaters, etc.) but those talks are in their infancy.
 

ak716

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is west Seneca fire moving to the new system? Or staying on the uhf system
While I'm not 100% confident about it, and @weweber1991 would probably be more in tune with it all, an FD in that town that I'm aware of recently upgraded to APX 6000s, so that would cut short their return on investment of that expensive upgrade. IMO, switching from an APX6k to an XPR would not be an "upgrade", radio speaking.
 

ak716

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Ahh, makes sense.
Having a UID list makes it easier to track "unknown" or new TGs. You can see who is using that TG just by RID/UIDs. Say X Police Department switches over, and you get a pretty good file of RID/UIDs from an unencrypted TG. Then a new TG "pops up", To make it even better, say they throw on some encryption on it; you can use that information to see oh, investigators or detectives 1,2,3, and 4 are all that are using it almost daily. It would be logical to assume that it's an encrypted "investigations" TG, then. All without hearing a peep behind that encryption.
 

ak716

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Any tips/recommendations for a novice/budget user would be much appreciated. Thank you! :)
Quick Start Guide

Buy a legit RTL-SDR dongle ($45), then get DSD+ Fast Lane ( $25). There is PLENTY of post on RR Forums that answer just about every question with this setup. A well-trained monkey can figure it out. There are even plenty of YouTube videos that explain everything about it.
 

Wackyracer

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Quick Start Guide

Buy a legit RTL-SDR dongle ($45), then get DSD+ Fast Lane ( $25). There is PLENTY of post on RR Forums that answer just about every question with this setup. A well-trained monkey can figure it out. There are even plenty of YouTube videos that explain everything about it.
That is the least expensive way, but it will have a huge learning curve for many.
 
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