Ok, explain to me what a trunked system is.

And what is a good trunking scanner.

How do I use it, does it hookup to my Kenwood THD7G Portable Ham radio? etc etc...

Most of the police around here now use 800-900Mhz frequencies which are trunked...

The basics to a trunking system is simple. The portable transmits at freq 125 and recieves at 126. Whenever the trunking towere heres something on 125 it automaticly transmits on 126.


portable A 125

to

Trunking system
Trunking transmits that message one 126

to everyone/portable B that recieves msg from portable A on 126


Make sense?

Trunking scanners can be cheap to exspensive depending on what you want them to do. also 800-900 police are usually digital now. or can be at least. No the scanner can not hook up to your portable (it may if kenwood put something out for it but I dout it). However you can rig it into your comm gear so you can here the scanner and chat on your radio.

Thats the basics I am sure someone can tell you more or at least I will add a little more later.

Simply put, trunking permits a large number of users to share a relatively small number of communication paths - or trunks. Commercial telephone communication is a wireline version of trunking. This sharing of communication paths is managed automatically by a computer. Channel selections and other decisions normally made by the radio user are made by the central controller, a computerized switch. Channel assignment is automatic and completely transparent to the individual users.

Trunking offers many benefits, including faster system access, better channel efficiency, more user privacy and the flexibility to expand. Because of its flexibility, a trunked system can expand along with your operation, to accommodate a growing number of users and restructuring of talkgroups. And it can be continuously upgraded with software.

With trunking large quantities of users will no longer need to share a common RF channel and compete for air time. In addition, users won't need to monitor a channel in order to make a call on their own.


There's many different flavours out there...

Motorola
--------
-AdvantagePlus
-Very low-end, VHF or UHF trunking system, SM50, SP50 models only

-Privacy Plus
-Type I trunking, used in older systems like London Fire Department

-StartSite
-Type II trunking, single site, several commercial systems

SmartNet
-Type II, with enhanced features (emergency, interconnect)

SmartNet Simulcast
-Type II linked with several sites (York Regional Police)

SmartZone
-Type II multiple independant sites linked (OPP, ambulance, Toronto Police)

SmartZone OmniLink
-Very Wide Area SmartZone (MTS, RCMP [Manitoba])

GE / Com-Net Ericsson / Tyco
----------------------------
MARC-V (Multiple Access Radio Channel)
-No known on-the-air systems)

EDACS (Enhanced Digital Access Communications System)
-Original Trunking offering (Toronto Ambulance)

AEGIS EDACS (First Generation Digital Voice)
-Original Digital offering (RCMP [Ontario])

TrueVoice EDACS (Second Generation Digital Voice)
-Enhanced Digital offering (London [Ontario] Police)

ProVoice EDACS (Encrypted Digital Voice)
-Encrypted Digital offering (Peterborough/Chatham [Ontario] Police)

SCAT (Single Channel Analot Trunking)
-Data and Voice offering (Enbridge Consumers Gas)

E.F. Johnson
------------
LTR (Logic Trunked Radio)
-Business-class analog (Many commercial businesses)

PassPort (Enhanced LTR)
-Wide-Area business-class analog (Many commercial businesses)

TAIT
----
MPT-1327
-European standard (most European police agencies, and the TTC)

TETRA
-Digital offering of MPT-1327



That's about it...there's many other kinds, but these are the major ones.


Sorry for the quick responce, I just cut-paste from another email I sent...any questions, just ask!


-Mike

Thanks a lot! That helped me tremendously.

My next question would be, what scanners should I look at that do both analog and digital trunking.

I heard the Bearcats are really good for this.

The best scanner hands down is the RadioShack PRO-96. It does digital, analog as well as trunked. It does 50,000 channels (yes, you read that right, 50 thousand).

Uniden makes a few good scanners, but the PRO-96 has absolutely amazing audio. It has a feature called AGC - Automatic Gain Control. On analog, it doesn't do much, but on digital, it adjusts audio levels so everything from a whisper to a scream sounds the same.

And, it's 500USD. The Uniden is 350US, but you also need a 200US dollar card for digital. The PRO-96 has it all in one for 500.

-Mike

Excellent, my friend works at RS.. I'll have him "borrow" one tomorrow.

i gonna have to get me 1 too, was gonna buy a scanner a yr or 2 ago but decided to wait and see what happened with digital.

Just out of curiosity, how expensive / difficult would it be to set up your own trunked system? I had a bunch of radios that needed a trunking controller to work, and since I didn't want to buy one and go through the hassle of setting it up I gave them away. Would it be at all possible to do this cheaply?

Well, you'd need at least two repeaters (one for the control channel, one for a voice channel).. a MSF5000 trunking repeater would run you at least 1000, so there's 2 grand. A trunking controller, probably about another 1000 dollars. Plus all the other stuff like cables, combiners, bus controllers, probably another 500 or so.

So yeah. A lot of money...hehe

But, it would be really cool to have your own trunking system!

-Mike