Motorola Type II Trunking STATUS BITS

Some older style trunk tracking scanners (as well as modern Trunk Tracker III's with the option "STATUS BIT" turned off) will not always follow radio traffic on a talk group when certain options are enabled on the dispatch console.

A practical example is currently in San Diego, 7A Fire Dispatch has been patched with some other talk groups for weeks now. Some users of older trackers have reported that they miss dispatches oftentimes. Normally on 5008, this talk group now appears on various other combinations throughout the day. The more modern trackers automatically interpret the status bits and transparently correct the changes, however, on the first generation of scanners, it is ignored. Therefore, to hear 5008 (7A) on a BC-235, you would have to add the following talk groups to your scan list to catch all of the dispatches. 5008 5011 5015 4395. In this case, the first 3 look like regular status bits, but the last one, 4395, is odd and I can only speculate it is the other side of the patched talk group with its respective status bit. Why SDFD is doing this currently is a mystery.  It may have purpose or be some accidental setting that was enabled.  Motorola radios also adjust automatically.

Here is a list of some common status bits. From this list, you see that 5011 represents that 5008 is patched as does 5015. 5015 does not make sense as no fire users utilize DES encryption, and that's why I suggest there may be an oversight at the console.

TTID + # Usage
ID+0 Normal Talkgroup
ID+1 All Talkgroup
ID+2 Emergency
ID+3 talkgroup patch to another
ID+4 Emergency Patch
ID+5 Emergency multi-group
ID+6 Not assigned
ID+7 Multi-select (initiated by dispatcher)
ID+8 DES Encryption talkgroup
ID+9 DES All Talkgroup
ID+10 DES Emergency
ID+11 DES Talkgroup patch
ID+12 DES Emergency Patch
ID+13 DES Emergency multi-group
ID+14 Not assigned
ID+15 Multi-select DES TG