Constant Beeping Scanner Defeaters
 

Hello,

There are a couple of Police repeaters in my area that have a contant
"beeping" carrier on them all the time, except when it is actually repeating
something. The repeaters are fully monitorable if you don't mind the
constant beep in between, but obviously a scanner will never skip past them.
I suspect the purpose for this is to make is so annoying for scanner
listeners that they just forget about it, so....

I am wondering how the radios of the intended audience (police officers in
this case) work. They obviously aren't listening to this beep all the time.
I was thinking that maybe they were doing something with CTCSS and/or DCS
tones, as until recently scanners with this capability were not commonplace,
but so far I haven't figured out how it works.

One of the two does transmit the same CTCSS tone regardless of whether it is
the beep or voice, so that doesn't appear to be how that one works.
The second does not appear to transmit any CTCSS tone at all at any time.
I haven't done any DCS searches yet, but I do have the capability of
decoding DCS if anyone thinks that's how they are doing it.

If it isn't DCS or CTCSS, I would have to assume it is some specialized
feature of their radios. By the way, these are both regular old UHF
frequencies.

Thanks for any input.

Have you tried monitoring transmissions on the repeater's
input frequency? You probably need an outdoor antenna
to hear the portables and distant mobile stations.

--
================================================== =======================
Bob Parnass, AJ9S GNU/Linux User http://parnass.com

"Bob Parnass" wrote in message
Have you tried monitoring transmissions on the repeater's
input frequency? You probably need an outdoor antenna
to hear the portables and distant mobile stations.

Actually the repeaters in question are both cross-band repeaters. I can
monitor the main frequencies, but I would like to monitor the cross-band
repeaters as well, because depending on my location, they can be received
better than the main frequencies.

The big question is how are the intended users not hearing the annoying
beep, and is it something that can be ignored by today's scanners. Obviously
somebody listens to the repeater, or why have it. Plus, as I recall, back
in the old days of old VHF mobile phone systems, those repeaters did the
same thing (again, I would assume to annoy scanner listeners enough to
ignore monitoring them).