[TheList] Pager Decoding

Tue Jan 12 18:51:18 AEDT 2021

Mine seem to stay on frequency pretty good.

Always have 100% decode rate on my ambo one.

The Flex requires a very clean signal.

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From: TheList <thelist-bounces at radiowiki.org.nz> on behalf of Craig <cokekid at orcon.net.nz>
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 8:25:37 PM
To: thelist at radiowiki.org.nz <thelist at radiowiki.org.nz>
Subject: Re: [TheList] Pager Decoding

Something to be aware of Brendan - SDRs seem to drift with heat

Find myself re-tuning the offset +/- a few Hz every couple of months. Local decodes will start to degrade, or overall hit rate decrease. And some end up with inability to correctly complete decode. (or drop the likes of amb)

Soon as I find the right offset or slightly off frequency to centre it again using the PC, and transfer back to the Pi again. Away it goes again.

On 12/01/2021 7:57 pm, Brendan Sheehy wrote:
Mine is all sdr with outdoor antenna

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From: TheList <thelist-bounces at radiowiki.org.nz><mailto:thelist-bounces at radiowiki.org.nz> on behalf of Radio Scanner <rs157950 at gmail.com><mailto:rs157950 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 6:09:43 PM
To: thelist at radiowiki.org.nz<mailto:thelist at radiowiki.org.nz> <thelist at radiowiki.org.nz><mailto:thelist at radiowiki.org.nz>
Subject: Re: [TheList] Pager Decoding

Whats the hardware setup you are using Brendan? Also internal/external Antenna? I just wonder if by using an outdoor Antenna im receiving too many towers and they are out of sync and causing corrupted data - thus the slightly lower decode rate?

On 12/01/2021 12:47 p.m., Brendan Sheehy wrote:

It will just need some very fine adjustments.

I would highly recommend using the Line In not the Microphone as windows does all sorts of funny things with the mics

The 3 i’m monitoring vary greatly between 52 – 100%

Cheers

Brendan

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From: Radio Scanner<mailto:rs157950 at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 11 January 2021 10:00 AM
To: thelist at radiowiki.org.nz<mailto:thelist at radiowiki.org.nz>
Subject: Re: [TheList] Pager Decoding

What's your gain set at? Shouldn't need any more than 1/3rd the way up the scale tbh. Hopefully someone else can chime in (Brendan?) and tell us what their decode rate is as it would appear to be a system problem rather than ours.

On 10/01/2021 9:21 p.m., DogSecurity - Richard wrote:

Yeah could give that a shot. My plan was to move down south but then the lockdowns happened and work got busy, so the place I moved into is a temp setup (my aerial is the old VHF TV aerial that noone has removed yet)

I assume the SDR on a crap aerial is the probable cause of a low decode rate, however when listening to the channel, it appears I'm decoding everything/nearly everything, hence ignoring the decode rate.

Sent from a mobile device. Please excuse my brevity, punctuation and spelling.

On 10 January 2021 4:16:58 pm NZDT, Radio Scanner <rs157950 at gmail.com><mailto:rs157950 at gmail.com> wrote:

Interesting you mention such a low decode rate Richard, I noticed my decode rate drop a couple years ago from 99-100% to 35-40%, despite my setup not changing in the past ~8 years. Uniden scanner with disc tap feeding a 2 level slicer on the serial port. Another machine runs a SDR dongle on the 925 channel into a 2 level slicer from the audio output. This channel's decode rate is anywhere from 20-25% with an average number of messages. You might try using the command line rtl_fm program instead of SDR# / SDRConsole.

On 10/01/2021 3:47 p.m., DogSecurity - Richard wrote:

Hey Mike,

I'd say that it's probably your volume levels. I've never done the discriminator tap, which may have made things harder, but getting the computer volume and scanner volume just right is nothing short of a pain in the ass.

Right now, I'm temporarily using an SDR dongle. The volumes are (SDRsharp keeps crashing on me so I'm using software called SDR Console) 100% output on the software, 61% on the VAC input. This gives me an average of about a 40% decode rate according to PDW 3.2b01, however I physically seem to be decoding a lot of messages so I'm ignoring that decode rate

Sent from a mobile device. Please excuse my brevity, punctuation and spelling.

On 10 January 2021 2:04:22 pm NZDT, Mike Trump <mtrump at orcon.net.nz><mailto:mtrump at orcon.net.nz> wrote:

Hi Guys,

Happy New Year to one and all.

I have a little query regarding pager decoding using the PDW software

and I'm not sure if it's a setting that's wrong

or the way I've set this up.

For years I used this program to monitor the Fire Service FLEX paging on

157.9500, using a Uniden UBC-9000 scanner

via a discriminator tap I'd installed in it and it worked good as gold,

until one day the scanner just stopped

receiving anything at all (it's on the list of things to fix, once I get

around to it).

Today I tried the software again, just out of curiosity with a handheld

scanner plugged into my laptop microphone

input, I'm pretty sure I have all the audio levels correct and the

software is running fine, but it won't decode anything?

I got a few POCSAG messages but that was it, have I messed something up

here?

Does anyone else here use a setup like this?

Cheers,

Mike Trump.

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