46
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.
