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Yes, Virginia, there really is a Status Bit

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TonyS

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Jul 23, 2004
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234
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NJ, USA
I've read up on the status bit but not sure if I'm understanding its useage correctly. Can someone please explain if/why I should enable it? TIA.
 

Jay911

Silent Key (April 15th, 2023)
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Bragg Creek, Alberta
It's actually type II systems that use the status bit, not type I.

As for whether or not you should have it enabled, I've heard several different trains of thought on that one. Let me do some explaining...

In a Type II system, talkgroups (in decimal format) are always cleanly divisible by 16. Therefore, for example, 160 is a valid "base" talkgroup, 165 is not (160 divided by 16 = 10, 165 divided by 16 = 10.3125 which is not an integer - there is 'remainder'). This is because there are fifteen extra "bits" that are added to a talkgroup to signify different features and such in use.

For example, if a user has pressed their emergency button, the talkgroup has a bit of 2 added to the base. So our mythical 160 talkgroup would now become 162 (as far as the number being sent by the control channel is concerned). This is done to allow receivers (primarily other radios on the system, of course) to know when such-and-such a feature is active.

The original trunktracking scanners, for whatever reason, showed you the talkgroups with the status bit added. This was not a problem if you were in a search mode. However, if you were scanning from a scan list, and had 160 in the scan list but not 162, if there was an emergency call, your scanner would zip right by it, because the talkgroup values didn't match.

Newer scanners got smart and included code that calculated the base talkgroup regardless of any status bits that were enabled on the talkgroup. So if it was an emergency call (162), a patch (163), or a multi-select (167) - you would still pick it up even if you only had 160 in your talkgroup list.

Status Bit ON = find the base talkgroup (i.e. show 160 regardless).
Status Bit OFF = Show the talkgroup with the status bit values added (i.e. 162).

Of course, it's too much to ask apparently for scanner designers to include something that will let the scanners do something with the status bit values. For example, it would be a really neat idea if you could set your radio to alert you whenever an emergency alarm is tripped. With the Status Bit enabled, though, none of the current radios support this. What some have taken to doing is turning off the status bit and then putting all talkgroups +2 in their scan list with beep alert enabled. However, if you're on a system like the one I monitor, with ~200 talkgroups and people doing patches, multi-selects, coded transmissions and emergency hits all the time, that isn't very practical.

Here's an explanation of what each value means...

TTID + # Usage
ID+0 Normal Talkgroup
ID+1 All Talkgroup (example: "calling all cars" type broadcast)
ID+2 Emergency
ID+3 talkgroup patch to another
ID+4 Emergency Patch
ID+5 Emergency multi-group
ID+6 Not assigned
ID+7 Multi-select (initiated by dispatcher) (example: dispatcher is broadcasting on 304 and 336 at same time, resulting in the values of 311 and/or 343)
ID+8 DES Encryption talkgroup
ID+9 DES All Talkgroup
ID+10 DES Emergency
ID+11 DES Talkgroup patch
ID+12 DES Emergency Patch
ID+13 DES Emergency multi-group
ID+14 Not assigned
ID+15 Multi-select DES TG

Values 8-15 are the same as 0-7, but with encryption enabled.

Hope this helps :)
 
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