by G4RMT » Sat Nov 10, 2018 9:04 pm
Well - with digital, there are loads of extra facilities - and some are similar to analogue where we have CTCSS and DTS tones that prevent radios perking up when the wrong tone is received - that way people can share channels unaware of the other. Obviously there's just one person able to talk at one time, so some clashes occur. In digital systems (and this will be very confusing) there is the facility to do something similar but with digital codes rather than tones. The stupidest thing is that the colour codes are actually numbers, so CC11 is not a colour at all. Normally 0 to 14. It's just a system to allow people to have a bit more privacy - a workers group, a supervisors group and maybe a bosses group, or physical locations - the workshop people on 1, offices on 2 and dispatch on 3 etc.
However - we do not normally publish frequencies and the CC details. The hobby is in a dangerous state, and many users of new digital systems believe their comms are secure. If we publish the frequencies AND the CC details then anyone on the net can listen in, and worse, join in! Some forums will publish the info, but we believe doing it encourages users to start to use encryption, which we cannot then listen into. People disagree on this, but OFCOM publish licence frequencies, and it's not a hard job to discover the CC they are using yourself. Slapping it up for the whole world just encourages people to encrypt, which kills the hobby. If you publish CC details the pods usually delete them. We understand you want them, but as radios are generally programmed from a computer, it takes little effort to stick them all in and see which one works. This is just how this forum works, and in general, I think it's our little bit for the scanning community. Others disagree. This is fine, m but CC codes here are not what the majority want, or of course the forum owners, m who set the rules we follow.
So to recap - in analogue, you set a frequency and enter 98.3Hz or whatever which shuts your radio up when it hears things that will annoy the users. For listeners, of course, CTCSS is pointless as we want to hear everything. With digital, you won't hear anything without the correct colour code set.