 Hello! How's everybody doing? Woohoo! I've got 5 o'clock by my watch, so we're going to go ahead and get started. Those that aren't here can catch up as we go. So just real quick, it's kind of hard to see with the bright light, but how many people out here actively own a scanner that they listen to stuff in their area? Good. Woohoo! That's right. So we're going to talk a little bit about scanning and listening to different radio systems and talk about some of the changes that are coming up in some of the different systems and how there's some different trends that are happening and what it's going to take to be able to listen to these systems long-term and kind of identify how some of the systems lay out and work. Since there is kind of a mixed audience here, I'll have just some basic overview of the beginning. I'll go real quick, I promise. And then we'll kind of progress from there and go through the next 50 minutes or so and try to show you guys some neat stuff. So the very beginning, we start off with the very basics of radio. So we have different types of frequencies that are out there that people can use and different methodologies for using those frequencies. The very basic is what's called Simplex, which is when there's two radios and they use the exact same frequency, they transmit back and forth and talk to each other. So that means one user, one frequency are actually the same people that are on the same frequency talking, so it could be two users. But then they can talk all using that one frequency. That's called Simplex. The challenge with that is then everybody has to have their own frequency and then you start to run out of frequencies because there's only so many of them out there. Then you start interfacing with tones. There's two different types of tones. CTCSS and also DCS. CTCSS is Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System and otherwise known as PL or Private Line depending on which flavor you're using. What that is is a subaudible tone that actually rides with your audio carrier and if you are trying to talk to another radio, if that radio doesn't hear the tone, the squelch never opens up and so you don't ever hear the audio. So now I can be sending a tone of one, two, three and if you're listening for a tone of four, five, six, you'll never hear me talk. That means that we can all be on the same frequency and start talking and I can have a conversation up here with Taylor and you guys can have a conversation with somebody else and we'll never hear each other, but we're all on that same frequency. Obviously there's some interference challenges there that is you continue to add more and more people, it gets a little bit more challenging to say without having multiple people on there. Next is Digital Coded Squelch System. That's kind of a newer style of the subaudible tone. Instead of a subaudible tone, it's actually a digital code that's sent along with your audio. Same thing, the receiver has to hear that digital code or it doesn't open up the squelch and people don't hear it. So the problem with Simplex and Tones and all that is you don't have enough coverage. When you're in like a building like the Riviera here and if you want to have coverage down to the other end of the strip that Simplex frequency just isn't going to work. Some people will probably use CBs or FRS radios or something like that and they just can't get the distance at them. That's because it's all Simplex, point to point, one radio to one radio. So you introduce a repeater. A repeater uses two different frequencies, one for the input and one for the output. So that means I transmit on one while you're listening on the other. All I have to do is make it to the repeater. The repeater then sends out with a lot of power a really strong signal to get to the other side. So it really extends the coverage and that's the real use for repeaters. So that's the end of the basics. I'll get into the good stuff now. So if you want to listen to stuff, back in the day it was really simple. Everything was what we would call conventional or traditional or Simplex or however you want to refer to it. And it was just simply dialing in a frequency. We hail out of Utah and our systems there were VHF based, I should say were VHF based. So if we wanted to listen to the Highway Patrol out of Salt Lake City we'd simply tune a radio to 154905 and we could listen to the Highway Patrol. We have a statewide frequency there for law enforcement which is where they would do all the high-speed chases and that kind of stuff and you would simply tune to 155505. Made it really simple, really easy. You could buy any scanner, you could buy any ham radio punching these frequencies and you were good to go. There wasn't a lot of complexity to it. If you had a tone you could turn a tone on and then only hear that specific person or if you didn't have tones you would just hear everybody on that frequency. But nowadays it's gotten a little bit more complex. Not the trunked radio is a new technology. It's actually quite old, it's been around for a long time but there's a lot more people switching over to it and a lot of agencies are making moves to it specifically in Utah as well. There's a large contingency of people moving to it but we see that across the board. Along with trunked systems now we're introducing digital technology and encryption. Encryption's been around for a while but again it's getting more and more used. We'll talk a little bit more about both of those as we progress. So what exactly is trunked radio? Well I talked about having users sharing a frequency. So the Highway Patrol was on 154905, right? So that means all the Highway Patrol guys are running around with that frequency programmed in their radio and that means somebody else is on another frequency. So everybody's organized by frequency. What happens in a trunked system is everybody's sharing a group of frequencies. So if I have five agencies under the old model I had to have five frequencies where now if I have let's say 20 agencies I can have those 20 agencies sharing five frequencies and all those agencies are grouped by what's called talk groups. So talk groups are little clubs of people or little organizations if you will that are identified by a number on the radio system. So what happens is when that radio keys up it tells all the other radios out there it says hey everybody in my group let's go over here so we can talk real quick. So it's just like this room. We've got a whole bunch of people in here we're all sharing the same room but we could organize out by state of who goes where and all of a sudden group up into these little groups. That's kind of like what talk groups would be. You would group up with people that are of a similar service or a similar function in that specific area. Radios then monitor a central control channel. This is one frequency that is controlled and that's where all the noise and data is sent out from the radio system that controls who's doing what and what frequencies they're on. What that does is when somebody keys their radio it sends a little data bit up to the control channel and says hey I want to talk to everybody in my talk group then all of a sudden it sends out a data burst to everybody and says I need everybody to switch to frequency 5 let's say and then all those radios will switch over to frequency 5 they'll hear their traffic. When somebody unkeys after they're done talking everybody goes back to the control channel and waits for further assignment. So sometimes they'll stay on that frequency for a little while otherwise they'll just come back to the control channel. What that allows you to do is with like 5 frequencies for example you can have multiple agencies running you could have different police channels you could have different fire channels you could have tow trucks you could have taxi cabs all that can share the exact same 5 frequencies and they just bounce from within the control the control of the trunk system. There are 3 main system types of trunk radio systems there's a whole bunch of them out there but there are 3 main types and particularly 3 that we can monitor very easily there are Erickson, EF Johnson and Motorola Erickson their most popular system there is the EDAC system it's the enhanced digital access control system EF Johnson is LTR which is the logical trunk radio system and then Motorola there's SmartNet and SmartZone and we'll go into a little bit more detail about it Motorola is probably the most popular I know they're the most popular in the Utah area and I would imagine through your different areas the Motorola systems are probably the most popular ones that you guys end up seeing out there so we'll go into a little bit more detail about how those work so real quick let's go into a high level overview of how Erickson and EDACs and the LTR systems work so the EDAC systems are pretty straightforward it's kind of like what I just explained everybody monitors a central control channel when somebody keys up they all jump off to a frequency and when they're done they all jump back to that central control frequency each frequency is assigned an LCN or a logical channel number so the control channel tells the radio what LCN to go to it doesn't say go to 854.600 it says go to LCN 3 and then the radio's all jumped to LCN 3 what that means to scanner users is you have to program the frequencies for an EDAC system in LCN order if you don't program them in that order your scanner's not going to know where to jump to so when someone keys up that control channel says oh jump to LCN 4 you're going to jump to what is really LCN 5 or 2 or whatever because you've got them programmed in the wrong order so it's very key that you get the LCN numbers correct when programming up an EDAC system the controller tells all the radios to switch and then they jump back so frequencies must be entered in LCN order to be able to scan that or listen to it if you have an actual EDACs radio if Johnson logical trunk radio this is what the Riviera hotel uses here on their premises for security and housekeeping and everything they use an LTR system it's a little bit different it's a decentralized model so it doesn't use a traditional control channel that sits on one frequency it uses a series of control channels that are all sub-audible so on every frequency across the system the sub-audible data is sent so there's not a waste of a frequency for a control channel so let's say you had 5 frequencies on your trunk system the control channel if you are using a traditional system one of those frequencies is going to be the control channel that means you've got 4 more frequencies that you can use in an LTR system you can actually use all 5 because the trunk data is residing on all 5 frequencies simultaneously it uses sub-audible data to be able to send that out and then all the radios listen on their assigned channel it uses LCNs as well the difference here is people don't centrally locate to one control channel they listen on whatever one they're assigned to and they will stay on that channel unless somebody else is busy or if that frequency is busy then they'll be forced to jump so for example the primary frequency here at the hotel everybody will stay on that frequency and they won't move unless somebody else is talking on that frequency then they'll jump off to one of the other ones which what that means is if you have just a ham radio that's non-trunking and you know that primary frequency you can just punch that in and listen to it and you're going to pick up a good portion of the traffic unless there's a lot of other users and other traffic going on they'll start getting really confused because one person is going to talk from one group and somebody else is going to talk in another group and you're never going to hear the response and the two conversations are going to really get confusing really quite fast but it's kind of fun to listen to some of the stuff going on here in the hotel especially when this conference is in the area yeah it's good stuff if you haven't listened you should tune in it's good stuff so Motorola this is where the majority of the stuff is this is where the meat and potatoes are and we'll talk about some of those challenges and that that have been on the horizon the basic Motorola system is what's called a smartnet system and it sits all within a site you have a single transmitter in the middle and it's kind of maybe hard to see the colors there I've got two different people there I've got a black talk group and a red talk group and the single transmitter in the middle is radiating both of those different talk groups so it's radiating both black and red so these black and red users can travel anywhere around in that site and pick up their information back to that site or anything they're just kind of there and they're just picking up what's going on same thing with a scanner user if the scanner user is in this circle they can be able to pick up either the red or the black talk group without any problems whatsoever that's called a smartnet site with that there are 28 channels that are available within a single site so if you have a site like this you can have up to 28 frequencies within that and that allows you up to 60,000 radio IDs within a given site like that the next problem that you might run into is if you only have a single site and a single transmitter you might have coverage issues so let's say we stick a transmitter here on the top of the hotel it's going to cover the Las Vegas area pretty well but what if we need to be able to get a little bit farther out we might need to stick another transmitter on that what we can do is we can add in a simulcast which allows a second transmitter to be set up in the exact same manner that the first one was and so now you've got a site and a site two and a user can transfer back and forth between the two sites without any issues they retain coverage, they retain talk groups they can talk back and forth all that they want same thing with a scanner user a scanner user can be up in site two and in this case be able to listen to the black or red talk group at any time now if you fall outside of site one or two you're not going to be able to hear anything but if you're within the coverage of those two sites you'll be in good shape there is a limit with smartnet in simulcast and you can only have 10 simulcast sites per area or per network there so you can only have 10 transmitters within that that are all repeating that same traffic there's some different ones I'll show you some maps of some of the other transmitters and how they're laid out in our network back at our place the key here with the different sites is the data in the audio has to be synchronized because now I've got two transmitters sending out the exact same thing which means if you haven't synced up when you stand somewhere you're going to get time delivery difference between the two transmitters and you're actually going to get an echo effect so most of these sites are all synchronized via GPS to be able to offset themselves appropriately so where their coverage overlaps you don't get an echo you get a perfect mix of the audio back and forth and that is definitely a challenge for the radio engineers so next you jump up to a smart zone smart zone allows you to connect multiple sites together and these sites can be located anywhere and a site in this case can contain simulcast or not in this diagram here we've got three different sites we've got the black site, the blue site and the red site otherwise known as site one site two and site three in a smart zone system you can have a total of 64 sites all within a smart zone system and that encompasses what will make up a zone in the next slide when a user is in site one in this case you can see site one is only broadcasting the black talk group site three is only broadcasting the blue talk group and site three is only broadcasting the red talk group so as the users transition from site one out of their site into something like site three they'll head over to when they leave that area their radios automatically go into a search mode and they'll search for control channels of other known sites that have been programmed in so they'll start looking to say hey I'm out of coverage where do I need to go and they'll start to transition into that area that has coverage the radio will register or authenticate or associate to that site now controlling all of these different sites is what's called a zone controller the zone controller is a central database if you will that keeps track of everything and it says in this case the black talker abuser comes over to site three and it's going to ask the question does this black talker abuser have the rights to be on site three that's stuff that the administrators set up and allow them to either have the rights in this case if they have the rights it goes ahead and authenticates them site three will start then broadcasting out that traffic what this means to scanner users is you might be scanning around let's say you live in site three you notice site three doesn't overlap with anything else so one day you're just cooking along you're listening to the red talk group you scan around and all of a sudden you start hearing the black talk group and you say hey what's going on and then you're like hey that's cool you call your buddy and say hey listen to this and they start listening to it everybody starts getting in on it and that's really neat then the user decides to leave your area they run off and they register with another site and all of a sudden you lose that talk group you can't hear anything anymore so if you don't understand how this lays out and how users can authenticate and how the different sites can register the different users you might not totally understand why you can hear things sometimes and why you can't it's also important if you've got very overlapping coverage of sites in our area we have several sites that overlap with each other and depending on which one you're listening to you'll hear completely different traffic it's all on the same system but you'll hear different traffic all together so the next step up from there is if you have these sites remember within the previous one you could have 64 sites but what if 64 isn't enough for you well Motorola allows you to do what's called an omni link where you can create multiple zones and in each zone you can have 64 sites so that gives you a total of 192 192 sites to be able to run on that individual network same thing here same setup the user can go from site one to site three in the other zone and it automatically authenticates them and then their traffic starts repeating now at any time an administrator can block out anybody from moving from a site to a site so they won't register or they can form a site to a tele-site to only or always rebroadcast a certain set of traffic so that the site two and zone two will always rebroadcast the black talk group whether they're there or not and then it would always send out that traffic we have that in our area we've got some in Salt Lake we're surrounded by some mountains we've got some mountain cities and for whatever reason their traffic is always on the Salt Lake primary system there's no, I mean it's a 45 minute drive to get up to those cities but for whatever reason their traffic is repeated down into the valley for whatever reason and kind of progress forward that way so our system in Salt Lake, I'll talk real quick about it, it's called the UCAN system it was formed, excuse me as it was a Motorola smart zone omnilink so it's that last slide it's the big monster one it was established in 1997 became operational in January of 2002 just in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics this system was a big part in the Olympics and really got funded and backed because the Olympics were there in Salt Lake it was operating with over 120 agencies on the system and it consisted of over 15,300 radios there are many different sites we've identified up to 38 of them and the reason why I say known sites is if you look at the numbering scheme they go up to like 78 range and we've only got 38 sites that are known so either they're planning for some spacing in there and they don't have them yet or there's other ones out there that we haven't found yet and many of these sites have some simulcast I don't actually have the link on this one let me just break out of this real quick and I'll show you so this is kind of hard to see here but it's a map of the Salt Lake area this is the Salt Lake County site within the UCANN system and those little red pins there there are five of them are the transmitters that are all simulcast within that valley now any one of those transmitters can easily cover the valley without a problem but we've got five transmitters all simulcasting right there in the valley for that one location that means the coverage signal strength and everything is very good within that area it does introduce some challenges but it's very manageable for us and that's just one of the sites of those 38 they don't and that's one of the things the question was do they interfere with each other and it's because of the timing the engineers have to work a lot on it to make sure that the timing of those so when you're standing in an individual area and they don't work with that you're going to get two signals that come in and it's going to cause a problem some of the scanners, we've had some issues with some of the scanners in the area and we think it might be related to the simulcast because when we go to non-simulcast systems and listen to them, they're fine so it could definitely be because of that during the 2002 Winter Olympics there were 8.5 million transmissions on the radio system that averaged out to 5.5 per second so that's a lot of radio traffic and it handled quite a big amount oh there's this slide, I thought I had changed that from the link so there's that okay so this is one of the sites this is the Clayton Peak site that UCANN has there's of course a ton of them around the area there's five of them right in the Salt Lake County system or Salt Lake County site, this is one of the other ones that covers a little bit different area we happen to have some other radio equipment that we take up here on a regular basis and so this is an easy one for us to see and get close to but they've got different sites all around in Utah we've got the advantages of mountaintops here in Las Vegas you've got some mountaintop hills and what not but most of the stuff is on top of the hotels when you look at some of the database information that we'll show you here in a minute you end up seeing where some of these transmitters are at and they're just on top of some of the hotels around next I'm going to turn it over to Taylor he's going to talk a little bit about APCO 25 and what that means to all of us Hi! APCO 25 if I can push the right buttons APCO 25 is an association that public safety communications officials international they make sure that everything that the manufacturers are doing is on a standard it's an open architecture so everybody is available it's available to everybody but it does bring together everybody to make sure that we're on the same page and we're all going to be able to listen to their operability between different agencies we're all working on the same general idea their whole goal is all about public safety needs that's all they're out there for is just the radios and public safety needs some of the benefits with them is improved spectrum efficiency and it ensures that competition between vendors to make sure that they're moving forward the standard and nothing is staying stagnant so what does that mean for us it just means that as for scanners it means when you buy a scanner you want to make sure that it's APCO 25 they're doing all the digital standards so we can all make sure that we're able to listen of all of you that own scanners how many know about rebanding that's coming up not very many of you I hope you'll learn something here then rebanding is also called reconfiguration it refers to changes in the 800 megahertz band plan and it's happening right now because of nextel how many of you guys have nextel good the guys who have nextel you're actually when you use your walkie-talkies you're actually on a trunk system it's just a highly modified trunk system and it uses the same kind of what Brett just talked about and it actually is and the same as the public safety band so they're causing some interference and they realize that back in the 1990s and now everybody across the country is in the middle of that change and they're actually flipping the two bands and why won't it work because depending on what you listen to the three different systems Brett talked about if you listen to edax or LTR you'll just need to reprogram the new frequencies of the logical channels that he was talking about there's no changes on those systems or conventional if you listen to the Motorola systems that he talked about all their programming is going to change because when the upper radio talk group says to go to channel 85 channel 85 is no longer going to be the same channel as before so if you have a scanner that is not rebanding compatible or it's going to be able to get the firmware upgrades that have not been released by anybody yet so there's there could be a period where nobody can listen to anything on their scanners if it's a Motorola system what Motorola is they haven't really released what they're doing to anybody yet that we could find so they could just change their channel channelization and make no other changes to the data just be real easy just a firmware upgrade they could follow the P25 system with the app code 25 they haven't said they're going to I hope they do and they could use a completely new control channel format specifically for rebanded systems and they could do something else right now no vendors have released anything so when the system switches over and a lot of them are happening real quick I'll show you a map you won't be able to listen if it's a Motorola system I'll show you a map here just a minute he asked when the switch was scanners that will not work this is not a conclusive list but if you happen to have one of these scanners sell it on ebay now hurry we can you can grab this from our send us an email sending this list but you just want to make sure if you're buying scanners or if you're looking on ebay make sure it's available this might be a little hard to see but you can see the different colors here and they're in the different waves they're doing it across the country in different waves the blue is the wave that's being ready to change over in this end of this year quarter four so nobody's released a firmware yet nobody's tested it yet because they're not public on the public system so hopefully we'll see what happens but there could be a period where we won't be able to this is the timeline you can see that the blue is in the it's going to be done by the fourth quarter 2007 and you can see the other there and you can grab this and reference it with the map we want to talk a little bit about hardware and what that kind of means this is one of the hardware it's a trunking it's a pro 97 it's a very popular one of the most popular scanners it's an ebay one the pro 96 that's another one of their popular ones this one is digital because there is digital and analog this one does support digital and it's going to be supported by rebanding most of these are just for more upgrades some might be some of the radio check ones they're saying it might be an actual change in the hardware and there's the unit in br330t and the bcd 396t there's the analog version and the digital version both me and Brett have and it does support rebanding so and if you notice on the it is NASCAR certified sorry NASCAR guys the r stands for racing this is an aor version it's non-trunking conventional great for listening to aircraft public safety if it's not on the one of the trunking systems and then this is one that's coming soon and we haven't seen it yet but we looked it up online and there's review in these magazines that we're going to have anybody can come up and grab on it's the popcom and they were traditionally GRE was traditionally an OEM scanner producer for radio check they made like the pro 97 and those so now they're saying they don't like the direction that everybody's going with scanners so they're going to start to go direct so it's very similar to the pro 96 because they made it and there's a full review in the popcom magazine we have up here if you guys want to grab one it is going it's it better be it's brand new so we want to talk a little about finding stuff so when you're listening I don't know how many were in the talk before but they talked about direction finding UNIDEN has a very one of their specific features and they call it close call other vendors may call it something different I'm not sure what it does it instantly tunes to nearby signals just within a proximity you key up and it will tune to that it can show you their tone so you can find out who's going there so hotel security that's how we found them we just stood next to them while they keyed up there's you can do that with police you can do that like wireless mics you can be driving on the freeway and you can see a cop with somebody pulled over and they're talking on the wireless mic just turn on close call you can listen to the conversation does with FRS and everything too so we'll just kind of demo one that's there they just put it in a close call and you can have anybody as a radio actually can key up and you can listen besides that guy over there that's Sherpa Mike by the way he brought up all this stuff for us so we want to thank him so close calls pretty neat if anybody else will show you afterwards there's also direction finding you can use this to help find the signal but then you can do transmitter hunts so this box right here that we brought up it's a transmitter in a box on a battery and it just broadcasts a signal that we can program in the different things that it's actually called a piccon that's in there this guy up front that's where I got it from he can probably get your information but what we want to do is next year we want to have a competition we'll go hide this box somewhere and we'll go find it we'll tell you what frequency it's on but then you guys go find it and put a phone number in there and whoever finds it over so if you guys are interested please at the end of our slide we're going to show you our email we want you to send us an email and we'll see if we can set up that competition we couldn't really get the Doppler system in here kind of hard when it's on top of a car so there's a picture now I'm going to turn it back over to Brett he's going to talk about some of the cool software that you can use and I forgot my antenna over there it's a good direction finding antenna I'm not going to tell you who makes it because they didn't like me when I sent an email to them so you can talk to me afterwards but I don't want to tell them their name alright so when you're trying to get started and stuff it's sometimes a little bit difficult when you travel into a new area a lot of us travel for business and it's a little bit challenging when you go in you maybe go to the hotel at night and you're just sitting there watching CNN, television, whatever some of these resources allow you to kind of play around with your scanner a little bit and maybe be a little bit more successful and trying to figure out where something's going to be or who's going to be where something's going on in your area some of these resources will help you figure out what's going on and be able to track it a little bit better the first one and probably best online database is RadioReference.com if you haven't been out there I really suggest you go it's all free but they do take nominal donations and you get a little bit of enhanced functionality or something like that that lets you keep track of your systems that you're monitoring and whatnot but it's a great little reference and the cool thing is they've got moderators on there that submit changes and updates to the database so you can keep everything current so as you go out and find new things and discover them you can update them in the database and then everybody around gets those updates as well just the other day I found a new control channel within one of our sites sent that over they posted it and now it's there for everybody to see so RadioReference.com is a great source there for scanner control and recording there's a couple of applications that I've used the first one listed here is Trunkstar Elite Pro it's a commercial piece of software really designed for scanning or controlling multiple scanners simultaneously so if you've got a lot of base scanners at home ones that aren't handheld you can program them up with this and allow them to all be controlled essentially under one application gives you a nice little gooey interface and you can point and click around but it is a commercial software ScanRecorder version 1.9 I use this one fairly regularly it's simply a Vox recorder and program it to just start recording so then that way when you're listening to something if something's going on you can go ahead and start to record all those events I was down here last night at the black and white ball and we heard that there was a man with a gun out in the parking lot so I ran up to the room to try to get some audio for this and by the time I got up there it was all taken care of and it was all okay so I was hoping to get something good and be able to play it so ScanRecorder it's basically just a Vox recorder for the URL where you can pick that up as far as I know it's free I don't know if the guy wants donations or not but the download links are on his site ID tracker 2 I'll show you a screenshot of that that's really cool it actually monitors the trunk system shows you what talk groups are talking so you can see a listing of what's going on and allows you to then record based on some of those preferences so you can say I only want unidentified talk groups to record or I want all talk groups to record or I only want this one or that one or however you want to set it up if you know what's going on in the system and you're just like well there's nothing really to listen to but let me see if there's something new that way you can set this up let it run overnight and then tomorrow morning you look at the log and say oh there's all these unidentified talk groups and you can go listen to the recording that you made overnight and try to identify exactly what that was by listening to that audio and it's all in a condensed form so you don't have to sit there and wait for all these long delays where there's no transmissions you get it just the transmissions so just the meat of it the entire time so it takes that several hours of scanning down to a few minutes which is really nice very concise but lets you hone into it trunk monitoring I use a program called Unitrunker I'll show you that here in a second that actually monitors the control channel shows you what the entire system's doing who's on what frequency all the different talk groups and everything I'll show you that here in a second and then for programming on all the scanners you can do it from the keypad and there's usually some software that's contained within it it works really well and it allows you to program it gives you a little bit better interface sometimes point and click, dragging, copying, pasting those simple things that some of the built-in software doesn't quite have so Boutel's a good software for that it is commercial, they usually do have a demo version that lets you upload so many systems or something like that and they make it for a whole bunch of different scanners so the first one here was ID tracker this is the it up and running when I was at home you can see the log is down below you can see on these monitors you can't really read it too well but up at the top it shows you what's going on right now up here up at the top you can see the system I'm listening to is UCANN SLC which is the site the talk group that's active is 19712 which is UHP, Salt Lake County it's been hit 46 times and the current time is 2130 or 930 the hits 46 times what that means is since I've turned on this program it's been active 46 times what that tells me is that that's a fairly active talk group depending on when I turn this on if I look down on the logs down below you can see all the different things that have been listed or that I've heard during that time with all the hits being listed on the far right if you notice second from the bottom down there there's one talk group it's really hard to see on the screen it's in red it's 12352 and the text next to it says unidentified what that is is a talk group that I don't have listed in my program that doesn't know what it is and therefore if my program was set up to record it it could have recorded that now in this setup I've got five hits on that talk group now that could have just been one person saying hey what's going on and somebody saying nothing and somebody else saying okay well do you want to go take lunch and he says yeah sure and so that really doesn't tell me anything but if I monitor that for some time I could pick up more and more recordings and little pieces of information might be able to stitch the entire thing together I'm working on the airport system right now and there's a talk group that we don't know what it is we think it's something related to the baggage loading ramps but we're not sure they keep talking about things getting jammed but then they talk about vehicles at the same time so we're not exactly sure if it's just the vehicles getting the bags there or what so there's several of us that are all online trying to listen to the talk group and then we post what we hear and are able to record to be able to try and identify what it actually is so the next one here is Unichrunker let me try to bring up the live shot of it here okay so this is Unichrunker running right now on the oh it doesn't show does that show yeah there we go okay so this is Unichrunker running on the Nevada snack system the top section up here which is hard to read is listing frequencies on the left hand side of the screen and then it starts to list the users on the next column the actual ID of that talk group and then the ID of the radio that's transmitting so over here again you've got the frequencies the talk group the actual talk group number and then the ID of the radio that's transmitting down in the bottom section it lets me list out all the different people or the different groups that are on the system I can scroll over and I can see if there's any patches there aren't any current patches on the system what that would be is if they took two talk groups and they linked them together so they take the police and the fire guys or whatever and they link those two together so everybody can talk if that happened you could watch that on the patches down below I can go into sites these are all the different sites that it's advertising right now site 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 right now I'm listening to site 1 you can see that up at the top of the screen you guys can't see it I can see it it's a site 1 up there at the top of the screen so I know there's at least 6 other sites in here all the frequencies are listed there so now I know that I can go program that in my scanner the neat thing is with this all I have to do is scan around find a control channel plug it into the scanner and start listening and then all this stuff starts popping up so it makes it really nice to be able to figure out what's going on I can go into individual users here this is kind of neat if you really want to get up close and personal you can actually map the radios back to an individual user so these are the IDs of the individual radios the actual handhelds that the people are using and you can see that like right here this is police south command and there's the actual radio ID of the person that was transmitting at that time you see channel 1 emergency is active right now and then these couple of 50s they've been on there this weekend and I'm not sure what's going on some sort of test but with the actual individual user if you're listening to the radio traffic at the same time you can hear who checks on they'll say okay it's delta 42 or something like that and you can say oh okay and you saw the radio ID and then you can tie that back together and say okay delta 42 is this person tie that in with a little bit of direction finding you might even be able to go to the scene and identify oh that's Officer so-and-so and you put that in your database so now you know delta 42 is radio ID this is so-and-so here and now you've got this big map that you can build of who's where and who's what so it allows you to be able to monitor the system fairly easily all through that you can also watch affiliations affiliations are down here at the bottom it's showing you who's associating with the system when and where they're associating and you can see in the far right column join or leave see somebody just left it was radio 25723 which means they turn the radio off just associated and they're out of there so it's probably the end of their shift and they're probably headed home I would imagine it's 538 so it's probably about time the neat thing here is that they change different frequencies you can follow them and see them associate with a different side or a different talk group and actually bounce around the cool thing I like about this there's several programs that work just like what's called the discriminator tap which involves getting in and soldering to the board and this kind of thing this program really doesn't require as much modification with my scanner specifically it doesn't require any so I'm able to do this with just by plugging in the audio and all I've got here is just the scanner running with an audio cable plugged in and it's going in the mic line in the laptop so it's really simple if I take this out it's nothing but noise that's what a control channel sounds like and then the systems just sitting there watching in the way when I did that because it messed it up it didn't know what to do at that point so it should probably come back here in a second but that's all it is it's just nice little audio cable plugs in it's real simple real easy but it helps you if you go into a new area start to be able to track everything down and figure out exactly how that system is set up and exactly how it's working so that's called the universal chunker and you can go here down at the bottom and color code things so things pop up red and get your attention if it's an active talk group some other neat resources that are out there sample sounds the website that's listed here it's nothing but a bunch of digital sounds because sometimes when you're scanning around you'll hear something and you're like what is that it's just a bunch of noise you'll hear this kind of crap and you'll have no idea what it is so they've got a bunch of different sample sounds on there that let you listen and verify what's going on just like some of the frequencies if it was maybe some type of encryption or something like that you can listen to the sample sounds and hear what that is known to be and we can go forward from there and see the actual technology or whatever is being used at that point and then paging decoders, there are still pagers out there people do still use them I know a lot of people have gone off to cell phones but pagers are still out there so you can go to this website and they actually make some software to decode the paging traffic and actually be able to monitor that I used to work for a paging company it was really great to see all the pages going by that's when the monitors or the pagers were very popular before cell phones were really out there in text messaging and it was great to be able to see all that stuff going by last time I checked and I haven't checked check your laws before you do it but last time I checked paging decoding was not illegal it's not an encrypted signal it's just digital and actually decoding it it wasn't protected like a cell phone or something like that so you could actually listen to that without any problems but check your local laws just in case stuff to listen to here in Vegas and check out when you go back home the vice frequency is kind of cool it's not trunked or anything they're kind of antiquated here they're just running straight repeaters on VHF so 155.1.1.5.0 it's not always active but it's kind of cool downtown they'll set up all sting operations and that kind of stuff you can listen to that it's kind of fun Taylor said it's an easy way to find a hooker so maybe not the ones you want to pick up though so you might spend your night with a bunch of guys instead so I'll probably cost you about the same so anyway the goon frequency for last year DC-14 was 464.5.1.2.5 they were running a DCS of 131. Do we have a goon that can maybe key up their radio we'll do a little close call real quick and see well we had it anyway so this year DC-15 DC-15 it's 464.2.1.2.5 with a DCS of 131 that's their security channel and DC-15 469.3.2.5.0 with a DCS of 131 is their speaker channel for speaker coordination interesting this year they started throwing encryption on there so I think they maybe saw our talk come in and said we're going to go ahead and encrypt everything so on the security channel it's all does encryption and a bunch of static and noise and they do talk in clear every now and then but they kind of ruined our fun by encrypting it this year so and then the hotel system is an LTR system on your CD is all the frequencies for that the talk groups as well as some other things around here in Las Vegas some other systems with that so you can get all that more on your CD stuff to hit when you maybe go back home drive through retail these kind of things these are all fun things to listen to you can hear what people are ordering at Starbucks or McDonald's if you were so inclined once you have the frequency if you had a transmitter you could you know possibly transmit to the people in the drive through and I don't know just throwing it out there so business man frequencies otherwise known as the dot frequencies blue dot red dot green dot those are all associated with some type of that was one of the goons right there and so the the dot frequencies if you search for red dot or green dot these are standard commercial frequencies there's usually a lot of traffic on that FRS that's really good for conferences like this people bring in a lot of radios and you can listen to them chat media remotes this is kind of a cool one when they're out there doing camera stuff on the side of the road you can pick up the little wireless mic or sometimes the links actually back to their main office we've got a coordination frequency that's used for the helicopters and some of the remotes in Salt Lake and that's fun to listen to you can hear them call into the different cameras telling them to power up they established their link they tell them when to pan over and pan down and all this kind of stuff so it's kind of fun to watch that and then watch the news at the same time and you can kind of see the difference and especially need if there's like a high-speed chase or something on and you're listening to that thing and you're watching it on television and it's I don't know it's geeky it's fun so wireless mics you can listen to traffic stops if you didn't know that most of the cops wear a little wireless mic now and they record all the stuff you say if you got the frequencies for those scan through those it's one thing to listen to the cop call out on somebody it's a whole different deal to listen to what that person's saying to the cop during the traffic stop so that's kind of a fun thing to do other wireless mics when I was in track 3 I picked up a podium mic it wasn't the main one it was one sitting here it was during dark tangents talk yesterday and it's on 519.050 and it was kind of neat if you were there he was having some problems with his laptop and we could hear the whole conversation between him and somebody else up there at that time this mic wasn't picking it up but they had something else up on the podium that was picking that up and it was on 519.050 so sometimes it's fun to just kind of scan around different things, wireless mics are everywhere you can pick those up they're out there and they're listening here's a bunch of references we used as we went through some different things here's an email address for you guys if you have any questions you can get back to us on here if you need a copy of this presentation it's a little bit different than the one that was and it's a lot bit different than the one that was on the CD so if you need an updated copy shoot us an email here dc15 at schnevic.net with that we've got like 5 minutes we can open it up for some questions we do have about 200 magazines up here from popular communications they were good enough to donate those to us so feel free to come up here and grab one there's a review of that scanner and with that I guess I should have taken the questions before that's going to cause a lot of disaster so anyway we'll be over in the Q&A room and with that we'll answer any questions you have thank you was that?