InterceptRadio.com Forums

yes, i'm gonna say it. I'm new to the area and have a trunk scanner. I'm from the East side and was wondering how everything works. I have the pro95. I'm in sno county and i've looked at the freqs...from what i understand, i've added all the west simcast. The question what does each freq come from? Is one a county, another a city? On one i hear a lot of Everett PD and the other i hear a lot of sheriff. any info would help.



Another comment...has anyone started a website where people can post their programmed freqs? Or give an idea?

You're on the way. A good place to start would be an article written by Wiz. It's on this site - it can be found here:

http://www.interceptradio.com/wiki/index.php/Trunked_Radio_System_Monitoring

Read that article, and perhaps that will start to answer some of your basic trunking questions.

As for Snohomish County - depending on what scanner you have, you may or may not have to enter all of those "West Simulcast" frequencies.
Some scaners require having all of those frequencies in to work properly (usually, the older Bearcat and Radio Shack radios, such as the BC-235, BC-245, BC-895). Others only require you to put in the system control channel (such as the newer BC-250, BC-780, and others). And, some of those scanners may require you to program the frequencies while you are in "trunk programming" mode - which is different from normal programming.

I am making an assumption that you entered the frequencies into your scanner, and are just "scanning" them (just like you would normally do with VHF or UHF frequencies). With a smaller system, that will "kind of" work. The trunking system actually moves it's users around different frequences depending on the system usage. The system has at it's disposal a "pool" of frequencies to choose from for all users. So, on one specific frequency, you may hear Everett PD, Snohomish County SO, and some SNOCOM agencies using the same frequency in the same minute - but, I bet you aren't hearing the whole conversation for any ONE of those departments from beginning to end. The different conversations may be changing frequency from PTT to PTT (push-to-talk).

The Trunk Tracking Scanners actually follow the conversation from frequency to frequency. When properly programmed, the scanner will do this automatically - and, the process appears "seamless" to you, the listener.

Confused yet?

Brad.

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Whatever.....

Thanks for the reply. I've added the control track listed and it was nothing but noise.. static. I'm back in pullman where there is only a total of 10freq.. nice and easy. thanks.

ty