Lots of great info!!
Kumba - I want to listen to Charles mostly.. maybe prince george or laplata
Charles is fairly easy to program and listen to. Police are divided into four districts: D1 - La Plata, D2 - Indian Head, D3E - Waldorf (East), D3W/D4 - Waldorf (West).
Only two dispatch channels are active, though. D3E handles all calls for D3E and D3W/D4. D1 handles calls for D1 and D2. You'll also find La Plata Town Police operating on D1 as well....they pretty much work with CCSO and take dispatches from the same dispatcher. Listen for any callsign starting with the words "La Plata" and a number 600 to 699. I.e., "La Plata 611" refers to a town police unit, while "Adam 498" would be CCSO.
MSP lives on their own channel as well, but that's all they have. I believe it's just a filtered patch of their VHF frequency used for their state-wide comms. They go by the H designators, i.e., H-12, H-9. I think they also have one K9 Unit, K9-10. You sometimes hear an MSP unit switching over to D3E or D1 if they're assisting CCSO (or receiving assistance).
MdTA (Nice Bridge Police) and Natural Resources Police (NRP) do not normally operate on the county's trunked system. They have their own frequencies, all available on Radio Reference. However, I HAVE heard MdTA on the system before, when they were helping CCSO. They use 'N' designators, i.e., N-1, N-3, N-5, etc. Very rare, though, to hear them.
Fire/EMS has a primary channel, FE Main, and then they have six tactical channels that they occasionally move calls to if FE Main gets too cluttered. Tac 6 is randomly patched in to St. Mary's Tac 2, usually for mutual aid calls when Charles sends Fire/EMS units down to St. Mary's to assist in something. But I've heard it patched in on days when nothing is happening anywhere near the Charles border. Calvert has its own mutual aid channel, though, because their radio system is still in analog mode (Charles uses digital).
Fire/EMS is broken up into companies, which are all listed
here, and an apparatus breakdown
here. Engines are usually numbered from the top of the Company number. I.e., for Company 11 (Bryans Road), you have Engines 112, 113, and 115. Ambulances start at the bottom of the company number, 118, 119, etc. Even the NSWC Units (Company 20 for Indian Head, 21 for Stump Neck EOD, and 28 for Dahlgren) stick to this format it seems.
Beyond those, I don't listen much to the Jail, VanGo, or the utilities channels. No idea what's floating on those talkgroups.
Also, if you do get a BCD396XT, you can use the Unit ID feature. Normally, you program in a talkgroup in a trunked system as a number, say, 16552. But with the new Unit IDs, you can create groups identifying Fire, EMS, Police, by the individual unit ID. I.e., if I hear Ambulance 78, Tanker 5, Paul 151, etc.., key up, then my scanner will display that unit's callsign at the bottom of the screen. But only if I've matched up their UID, such as i22518, to their callsign (note the lower-case 'i' in front of the number).
I plan on formatting a list of these UIDs for most of Fire/EMS and a few CCSO units to put onto Radio Reference soon. Just haven't had the time lately.
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PG's a different can of worms. Right now, PG's basically switched over to a brand-spanking-new radio system, P25 Phase 2 TDMA-based. In a nutshell, it means they really can't be monitored anymore, as no scanner on the market can decode TDMA signals yet. But they will, in time, we hope. It's not a proprietary system (like ProVoice, used by Cecil County), just none of the scanner makers have had an opportunity yet to reverse engineer things. So Listening to either PG or even Loudon County is very tricky these days.
However, for now, if you use Radio Reference and plug in their older conventional frequencies, you'll still hear things, including PG Police, as their still patched in I believe. Only only through this year. I think Fire/EMS gets fully migrated to the new system at the end of this year, and in 2011, PG is going to relinquish control of their older frequency bands back to the FCC. So after that, they will be unmonitorable, unless Fire/EMS happens to have a FDMA radio (a.k.a., Charles, or DC, or someone using P25 Phase I) join in, which will cause PG's system to revert the entire talkgroup back to the monitorable FDMA mode (until that FDMA radio leaves the talkgroup)
When do TDMA-capable scanners come out? No one knows. Uniden's been really mum about it on the Radio Reference forums. GRE's publicly stated that none of their scanners has the appropriate hardware.
Hope that gets you started. Happy scanning!
