Incidents on the radio

[K9 TRS]

Hello everyone! I had a question after I got to thinking about it. My agency is small and we use a trunk system. We have the main net, alt net, and then a few TAC nets. My question is with these larger agencies such as tampa PD and hillsborough, with many many more incidents going on to Include traffic stops and proactive police items that are getting called in by the deputies and officers; how do their comms work in the sense of if there are a couple incidents going on that are getting dispatched and another unit is wanting to call in a traffic stop, high risk or not. I understand the larger agencies have the wants and warrants channel, but I'm assuming that the stop isn't getting called in over that first. I also understand once the incident is kicked off they switch over to a TAC net. I'm mainly just talking about the initial kick offs of incidents and units wanting to call in their location and initiation of the traffic stops.

Hopefully I'm making sense here. Completely random thought and question I had to see how the bigger agencies do it.

[tanksoldier]

Most big cities have several zones. Each precinct may be its own zone. They may have a zone for traffic as well, one for detectives... code enforcement, etc. There is often one reserved citywide channel for emergency announcements.

An officer monitors certain channels... his precinct channel, neighboring precinct channels, the traffic channel in his zone, etc... but primarily works off his precinct channel.

Even in my rural county we have a north channel and a south channel that the small towns share, a separate channel for the Sheriff, a separate channel for the only big city, separate channels for each fire district, and three clearance channels for traffic stops... you call out the stop on your main channel then switch to clearance to run DLs, VINs, whatever.

Everybody does it a bit differently, but essentially everybody isn’t on the same channel but monitors multiple channels.

[K9 TRS]

Makes more sense! I just find it tedious that once an incident pops off and dispatch is spouting the information over, if you're about to initiate a traffic stop, you essentially have to wait until it is said and acknowledged by the responding unit until you can go on the radio. Its our policy we have to call the information over too regardless of NCIC in the cars

[Iowa #1603]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ what Tank stated is accurate in many areas

Hello everyone! I had a question after I got to thinking about it. My agency is small and we use a trunk system. We have the main net, alt net, and then a few TAC nets. My question is with these larger agencies such as tampa PD and hillsborough, with many many more incidents going on to Include traffic stops and proactive police items that are getting called in by the deputies and officers; how do their comms work in the sense of if there are a couple incidents going on that are getting dispatched and another unit is wanting to call in a traffic stop, high risk or not. I understand the larger agencies have the wants and warrants channel, but I'm assuming that the stop isn't getting called in over that first. I also understand once the incident is kicked off they switch over to a TAC net. I'm mainly just talking about the initial kick offs of incidents and units wanting to call in their location and initiation of the traffic stops.

Hopefully I'm making sense here. Completely random thought and question I had to see how the bigger agencies do it.

MOST agencies are now going away from the "trunking" radio systems as the hardware and more importantly SOFTWARE is becoming obsolete. The state of the art is now 700mHz Simulcast computer controlled systems that are easily encrypted. These systems along with MDT's with the ability to run NCIC & traffic over the network is making the hearing of many aspects of police calls harder on people who do not have the systems installed and for scanner users

The above systems are horribly expensive & complex but offer many more secure ways of communication.

[westside popo]

Heard of Simulcast but never looked into it. Sounds interesting.
About a year ago they just started talking about a digital trunking radio system where I work. We're still using an analog VHF system and coverage is spotty especially on handhelds. With the proposed 800 MHZ digital system we, would have 100% coverage with just a handheld.

[Iowa #1603]

My county is going VHF digital rather than buying into the state Simulcast or the Regional Simulcast system that our neighboring counties are using. We will be essentially deaf to everything around us but all the systems can patch us in to their traffic if necessary
We couldn't afford the 3-5 million dollars necessary to join either group

[tanksoldier]

800 MHz Digital is never 100%, and when it doesn’t work it flat out doesn’t work. At least with VHF you can try to figure out what somebody is saying.

[westside popo]

Maybe this will explain the different systems out there and how they work.