Optimizing Multiple Site Trunk Systems

22Mar 2022 by Phil No Comments

Today, we discuss optimizing your scanner for multiple sites in a trunk system.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about setting up your scanner and optimizing it for a typical scan list, but today we will dive into this topic a little bit deeper.

What you need to know:

When discussing Trunked systems, a site may not be one specific location or one particular transmitter.
Instead, it may be one tower, one transmitter location, or a collection of transmitter locations networked together.
Simulcast are networked transmitters that key up at the same as a single large “site”.
When programming your Uniden DMA scanners, quick keys are assigned to sites and not systems.
In a Uniden DMA platform, we can assign each site their own key, or multiple sites to a single key.
This allows us to optimized our scanner’s resources on the fly and toggle only what we need to scan.
Uniden home patrol is slightly different because we have different ways of setting up and configuring our scanner.
We use favorites lists in the home patrol. We also use system quick keys, and then we can also use site and department quick keys.
need to create multiple trunk systems and then multiple sets of talk groups.
When programming your Wistler Object Oriented Scanners, Talk groups are assigned to keys, not systems or sites.
This means if we want to toggle sites, we need to program talk groups in multiple times.
We will also need to setup multiple systems with smaller site lists and assign talk groups to these systems if we want to toggle site scan lists
Whistler gives us another option that we can toggle in our system settings:
- Stationary – Scans all sites and all CC’s programmed into a system
- Roam – Scans all CC’s and stays on the best site until threasholds are met.
- Off – Stops on the first CC and will not move until signal is lost.
Thesholdhi and ThresholdLo are two settings that we can adjust on the Whistler models that I wish were options on all scanners.

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