Why?

[Chris5]

My company monitors Anne Arundel County Fire Department due to the fact we are near the line of the county. My question is that why aren’t we hearing the units on alpha? We listen to 154.010meg. My next question is are they doing some type of upgrade to there radios? Will we still be able to listen to the 154.010meg channel?

 

[n3ncn]

Yes they are on a trunked radio system.
154.010 is a patch channel to thier trunking system. You will need to montor thier TRS to hear the rest. It's in the data base. Hope this helps. Mark

 

[Llwellyn]

My company monitors Anne Arundel County Fire Department due to the fact we are near the line of the county. My question is that why aren’t we hearing the units on alpha? We listen to 154.010meg. My next question is are they doing some type of upgrade to there radios? Will we still be able to listen to the 154.010meg channel?

If you're referring to a specific instance where you can suddenly hear dispatch but never hear the units respond, it's a problem with the patch. The dispatchers have to manually establish the patch every so often, and sometimes forget to add the responses from the units back onto the channel. No one there notices a problem because the simulcast is used only for station alerting; all units are equipped with radios on the TRS itself.

If you need to consistently monitor them for operations purposes, I would suggest finding an old trunking scanner used and locking yourself onto TG 16. This also gives you the added benefit of not having to listen to the tones (unless you like to); the traffic on the TRS begins with the final tone of the call that signals the type of call. I actually prefer listening to the tones drop so I'm usually monitoring 154.01 on an old scanner; I keep the 396 around to follow any action I find by listening for tones.

 

[jpsmith2]

My question is that why aren’t we hearing the units on alpha?

Alpha is only used for dispatching. There is very little unit traffic that takes place on the channel. When a call is dispatched a TAC channel is assigned and the units respond & operate on the TAC until they clear the incident.

The most you'll hear from units on Alpha is them acknowledging a dispatch if they're on the air, short unit-to-unit messages (any conversations usually move to November), or a unit going In Quarters when there is a problem with the SME's.

154.01 is the simulcast of Alpha, used for pager & station alerting. As far as I know, none of the other channels are simulcast.

 

[Chris5]

Thank you guys very much for the info. I know we used to hear the units talking back to fire alarm and give there status and such. I will suggest we get an 800meg scanner to listen but I do like the tones though so I know when 9, 42, 1, and 41 have a call so as soon as they hit the tone we are off.

 

[troymail]

Actually - the other night I noticed the street units were not being heard on 154.01 (patch from Alpha) even though they have been about 99% of the time until recently. There have been occasions where some type of patch was down but it was an unusual occurence.

Come to think of it, I haven't heard the street units today on 154.01 either --

Either some patch is down for a good reason, they forgot, or this is the new way of doing things....

 

[troymail]

...well, it seems to be back to normal today..... too bad actually - I got used to the "quiet"