Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Marine Corps Marathon

The Marine Corps Marathon is this Sunday morning. The marathon is one of Washington's biggest events of the year, and provides a wealth of scanning opportunities. Here's a preliminary list of what I'll be monitoring, in rough order of importance (I'll try to go into more detail in the coming days):
  • Marine Corps P25 Trunked System - look for talkgroups in the 63xxx range. In previous years, this system has seen widely varying levels of encryption.
  • Arlington County P25 Trunked System - numerous talkgroups will be active, especially on the police side.
  • DC Trunked System - look for the SOD channel and/or Citywide 2 to be active with traffic control. The three DCFD Special Events channels should see heavy use.
  • Metro Trunked System - expect Transit Police to be very busy with crowd control, especially at key stations like Arlington Cemetery, Rosslyn, and Pentagon. The Police Tac channels have been active in previous years.
  • Park Police - expect to see 166.7250 [127.3] (R) in use.
  • Crystal City Security - Crystal City hosts a big street festival during the marathon. Security active on 451.7750 [ d205] (R).
Notes from past years are on my Arlington County page.

2 comments:

Steve said...

Are any of these trunks analog or are they all digital? Do you have a list of analog trunks in the NVA/DC area? Thanks!

David Schoenberger said...

The Marine Corps, Arlington P25, and DC systems are digital. The Metro system is mostly digital, but there are a few analog talkgroups, including the Metro Transit Police dispatch talkgroup.

As far as analog trunked systems in the area, there aren't too many. Arlington still runs an analog system, but it's not the primary one they use anymore. It's been kept active mostly for interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions. Just about every city/county in the area uses a digital system (DC, Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, etc.).