Batboard

Hi Group,

Way off topic, but I am sure my brethren here can help.

While at Motorola school in Schaumburg this last May, I spent quite a bit of time listening to the Chicago Police up on 460MHz on a dual-band portable I brought with me.

Can anyone tell me what kind of mobiles and portables the Chicago Police Department uses? The transmissions from the mobiles all had MDC on the tail of the transmission, the system is obviously voted and uses the "self-repeat" feature of what I would assume to be a Centracom II series console or newer.

The other request is, would anyone be able to send me a few hours of recordings from 1 or 2 very busy Chicago PD frequencies? I really enjoyed listening to Citywide-1 while I was there, and I can't find an online scanner anywhere for Chicago PD. Lots of fun.

Can't wait to get back to Schaumburg.

Thanks guys!

If you do a little searching on the web, I believe you will find someone already streaming the audio.
Try the CARMA yahoo group. Someone there would be more that happy to help you out.
- Darrell

They still use Saber 1's (possibly 1E's) and most generally carry an XTS3000 M1. I've seen a few with M1 5000's but not often. CFD uses those the most...

I was up there last year for the Blues Festival at Grant Park last year, and peeked in a few of the PD cars that were there. Some had Spectra's in them, and some didn't. All had MDT's. The Ambulances there had Maratrac and a Spectra/Syntor A9 head in them.

CPD has no Mobile radios anymore in patrol. The only exception is the incident command vehicles. A few specailzed units had Motrac and Micors for Citywide mounted in them. As Ray said its all Sabers or XTS's in the 460's


The Fire department runs VHF Mobiles in everything.

So the police cars don't actually have mobile radios in them, everything is done over the officers handie talkie? OK. Must have a pretty serious voting system across all those channels.

Any more info people can provide would be appreciated... (What type of voters, console equipment, etc)

d119 wrote:So the police cars don't actually have mobile radios in them, everything is done over the officers handie talkie? OK. Must have a pretty serious voting system across all those channels.

The answer is yes to all. By most reasonable accounts, police radio coverage is very good. Uniformed officers get XTS3000/5000 with a PS speakermic. Cars don't have mobiles installed.

I can get you some audio. A couple hours of Citywide 1?

Let's take it offboard.
PM or email:
[my batlabs username] @ hotmail.com

jnglmassiv wrote:

d119 wrote:So the police cars don't actually have mobile radios in them, everything is done over the officers handie talkie? OK. Must have a pretty serious voting system across all those channels.

The answer is yes to all. By most reasonable accounts, police radio coverage is very good. Uniformed officers get XTS3000/5000 with a PS speakermic. Cars don't have mobiles installed.

I can get you some audio. A couple hours of Citywide 1?

Let's take it offboard.
PM or email:
[my batlabs username] @ hotmail.com

I sent you an e-mail directly. Much appreciated!

What's funny is, is when Motorola sold the City of Chicago the UHF system, 61 receive sites were sold with it. *61*. I can say thru stories told that a few people lost their jobs over pushing that sale (you'd think a RX site on Sears and a handful of inner-city satellite sites would do fine). You can generally hear Citywide 1 in a good 50+ mile radius, conditions pending. As jngl said, coverage is outstanding. I don't think the units have very many dead-spots at all in the City.

d119 wrote:
The other request is, would anyone be able to send me a few hours of recordings from 1 or 2 very busy Chicago PD frequencies? I really enjoyed listening to Citywide-1 while I was there, and I can't find an online scanner anywhere for Chicago PD. Lots of fun.

Incidentbroadcast.com provides an online stream of Chicago PD. Go to their website and download Teamspeak, then register. There are easy to follow instructions on how to do this. I don't know how long it's been online, but I do know that it's relatively new. Interesting listening!

Rayjk110 wrote:What's funny is, is when Motorola sold the City of Chicago the UHF system, 61 receive sites were sold with it. *61*. I can say thru stories told that a few people lost their jobs over pushing that sale (you'd think a RX site on Sears and a handful of inner-city satellite sites would do fine). You can generally hear Citywide 1 in a good 50+ mile radius, conditions pending. As jngl said, coverage is outstanding. I don't think the units have very many dead-spots at all in the City.

There is a difference between receive sites, transmit sites, and tx/rx sites.

Of course, they may have only a handful of transmitters, but if its a portable only system, they would need all the receieve sites for it to not have talk-in dead spots, vs talk-out dead spots.

Hell, my old podunk PD used one transmitter site and 6 receieve sites, and that was using 50 watt mobiles and we still had some problems time to time.

Rayjk110 wrote:What's funny is, is when Motorola sold the City of Chicago the UHF system, 61 receive sites were sold with it. *61*. I can say thru stories told that a few people lost their jobs over pushing that sale (you'd think a RX site on Sears and a handful of inner-city satellite sites would do fine). You can generally hear Citywide 1 in a good 50+ mile radius, conditions pending. As jngl said, coverage is outstanding. I don't think the units have very many dead-spots at all in the City.

Given that a SpectraTac comparator cage will hold at most 7 SQMs in the first rack (8 in the successive ones) and the most you can daisy chain is 3 racks (or is it 4) (and, in real life, you'll start encountering voltage problems over 2), I'd be real interested in how they cobbled together a system with 61 receivers on one channel.