An EDACS® Trunked system

This chart shows how talkgroups are organised within an EDACS system at the AGENCY level. The individual talkgroups cannot be shown at this scale because there are over 2000. However the chart can show the 16 Agencies in this example. The system is logical and easy to understand. EDACS systems are typically arranged in an outline structure.

The system users are given blocks of talkgroups. Sizes vary but most large cities and other agencies have blocks of 128 channels. Smaller cities have only 64 or 32 channels.

In this example, the County Sheriff is agency 01. The city of Sullivan is Agency 03. Adams Hill and Matthew Junction share Agency 08.

Your scanner shows EDACS talkgroups in AFS (Agency-Fleet-Subfleet) format. This helps you see, at a glance, who you are monitoring. And with the partial-entry feature you can easily include nearby, related channels in the same Fleet or Agency. You can just as easily exclude entire unwanted Fleets and Agencies.

When in Search mode, with the system frequencies programmed, and your scanner locked to the control channel, you can select a desired city by keying in the AGENCY part of the AFS talkgroup. For example, you can select the entire city of Sullivan with 4 key

presses zero, three, , SRCH.

When you hear an interesting talkgroup, capture it to your scan list by pressing E during the transmission. Or HOLD on it by pressing the HOLD key.

If you want to monitor the Sullivan Police Dispatch channel (which is talk group 03-062), press zero,

three, , zero, six, two, HOLD.

Your scanner can also work in DECIMAL format. This talkgroup in decimal format is 434. But decimal format does not give you any information about the system hierarchy. For example Sullivan, in decimal, uses channels from 384 to 511. This is not as easy to remember as Agency 03. But decimal is useful if you need to work from decimal talkgroup lists.

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Uniden UBC780XLT manual An Edacs Trunked system