ID Tracker

Follow That Talkgroup!

by Mike Agner, KA3JJZ

Have you ever wished for a little utility that didn't hog your system, but allowed one to track down unknown talkgroups-or even catalog a system-without a whole lot of fuss? Well, it's here and it's called ID Tracker, written by David Hitchner K5DMH.

To start, you should download the program and capture the web page (for documentation purposes), both of which can be found here. The download comes in 2 flavors; one version is a complete download, the other is just an executable. The executable is useful only if you have other VB applications already on your PC.

I downloaded the complete version, number 1.40 as of this writing. Installation was straightforward and very easy; it installed into my C:\Program Files directory. I am using a 500 MHz Win98SE machine driven by a Celeron processor.

To simplify things a bit, I will use the term 'talkgroup' rather loosely in this review. This software will work with fleet/subfleet IDs (type 1 system) and EDACS talkgroups, so I will use this term in a broad generic sense.

Preparation
If you are preparing to track a system with which you are already familiar, you need to prepare a list of IDs and alpha tags. This program recognizes 2 formats; a text file or a .csv (comma delimited) file. Both are easily created by most database programs. I downloaded my Anne Arundel county database from Trunk Manager into a .csv format; I then used Notepad to remove the unnecessary fields. You can see a portion of the results in Figure 1.

This format is thankfully very simple; no fluff, no extra fields, nothing but what you would basically use as a quick reference for a trunked system.

You should then make sure that your BC245/BC780 is sending data at 19.2 kb. Follow the instructions on the web page, or see the appropriate page in your owner's manual as to how to set this up. Have the radio in trunked mode, and if you are using Multi-track, make sure to disable all your conventional banks. This software will place your radio into Trunk Search mode when it starts up. Make sure all other options are set up before starting ID Tracker, since most keyboard functions will be disabled.

Operations
One very neat feature of this radio is that if you have some connection problem, the program sends a debug screen. The message isn't particularly descriptive in this case (Figure 2); the problem I simulated here was that the radio and PC weren't connected.

If all is well, you will get a screen that looks like Figure 3. Before you actually start tracking for the first time, some setup work is required. Press 'SET' and you will get the setup screen Figure 4 with the following options:

• COM PORT- Specify which Com port to which the radio is connected
• NEW ID ALERTS - For those IDs that are not found in the list you provide, ID Tracker will play a sound. This sound is a 'beep', and is stored in the directory under 'alert.wav'. The web page says you can change this sound, so long as the name stays the same.
• BAUD RATE - This should always be set to 19200. I tried 9600, but the program started missing IDs occasionally.
• SLEEP - This is the only setting that will require some experimentation. It represents the cycle time required for the CPU to cycle between lookups.
• MIN DISPLAY - While tracking, it's possible for ID Tracker to display a short screen showing some very brief information on the current ID. There are 4 possibilities; ID and description, ID and description hold, ID and frequency, ID and frequency hold. I usually just setup ID and description as I feel that's the most useful of the bunch.
• EDACS - If you are tracking an EDACS system, you have the option of having the IDs show up in Hex, AFS or decimal format.
• LOGGING - ID Tracker will write a log with a date/time stamp of each ID that was encountered. Here, you can specify whether either unique or every ID should be logged, where that log will be written and even specify (using the Min Log Time box) how much time the talkgroup should be active before logging it. A setting of zero says log everything, no matter if the talkgroup was active for 1 second or 10 minutes.
• BANKS - This is where the setups are done for the file you have provided for alpha lookups There are 10 banks, and each can have up to 9999 entries. It should be noted that I was playing around with this software before writing the review, and had loaded 100 entries as a test; initially, each of the entries count will be all zeros. Each entry has its own hit counter to count how many times this talkgroup was used.

If this is your first time in, simply highlight which bank is being used as the trunking bank, then press 'IMPORT'. You will be brought to a file selection menu; simply select your file that you prepared earlier, and click OK. You can even edit your list (using the 'EDIT' button), merge your list with another file ('MERGE').

If you are going to trunk a different system, or need to reload your list, press 'CLEAR' then 'IMPORT'. If this is not your first session, and you want to start the hit counters over again, be sure to 'EDIT' your list, then hit 'RESET COUNTS'. If you don't reset the hit counters, they will start up again from the values found from the last session. See Figure 5 for an example of the 'EDIT' screen.

You're now ready to go. Press 'OK' and you will be returned to the initial screen. Press TRACK and you should start seeing data being tracked and stored, an example of which is in Figure 6. Notice that the 'TRACK' button has changed to 'STOP'.

Tracking
As you can see, the program is currently tracking the mutual aid talkgroup for Anne Arundel County. It has had 2 additional hits; what will happen is that when this talkgroup is released, the entry for 57584 will move to the top in the list, and the hit counter will be updated. If the currently tracked talkgroup is repeated, it will display in normal intensity, rather than the bold shown here. The history of past hits is in the box immediately below the current active box.

If you press the ? button, you will see a diagram which describes the limited keyboard functions that are available, as shown in Figure 7. Pressing the 'LIST' button changes the display; you won't see the history of past hits; rather, you just see a list of the current ID being tracked, as shown in Figure 8. Figure 9 shows the result if you hit the 'ID' button.

This display is controlled by the selections made in the 'MIN DISPLAY' option in the setup screen. If you want to change things around a bit, hit 'STOP', 'SET', make your changes, press 'OK' then 'TRACK', and you should see your changes take effect.

When your session is finished, if you had checked the 'LOGGING' functions in the setup screen, you can edit your log. If it's small enough, Windows Notepad will work very nicely. An example of the log is shown in Figure 10. Notice that the log doesn't sum the instances of identical hits; it just logs each ID, unique or not, with a time stamp.

As shown on Dave's webpage, this program can even be run in Windows minimized mode. In this case it will just show ID and talkgroup information. This is still quite useful; you don't have to squint at your display if you aren't looking at the 245 to see what talkgroup is being used.

Perhaps the only troublesome part is if you wish to use ID Tracker to identify unknown talkgroups. It isn't explained very well on Dave's page, so I dove into this question a little bit. With Dave's help, I found out how to do it.

The first thing to do is to make sure that you have the 'New ID Alerts' box checked (see Figure 4). Next, you must mark all the talkgroups that you do know about as identified. There are 2 ways to go about doing this; both are tedious at best, but they work:

• As each ID is encountered, press the 'ID' button. As was discussed before, this will bring up a small screen with the ID and whatever option you selected. Notice the 'identified' box at the top. Put a check mark in there. This ID is now marked, and will not be flagged as unidentified again. See Figure 9 for a description of this box.
• A somewhat longer, but more complete, way is to go to the options screen, highlight the bank that you want to put your Identified tags on, and press 'Edit'. The 'EDIT' screen will come up Figure 5. For each talkgroup, highlight it, press 'identified', then hit 'Save'. You will notice that a small asterisk appears in between the talkgroup and the description. I guess, though I haven't tried it, you could edit your file with Notepad or something similar, and place asterisks throughout the file, where identified talkgroups are documented.

Is It Worth Having?
This program is fairly simple to use and execute. The lookup file is commendably simple to set up and edit, most of the setup options are straightforward, and it's fairly easy to use. Most people would like to see some sort of help file, but to be honest, as long as you have the web page handy, most of the questions you are likely to have are answered there. The only setup option that would be difficult would be the sleep option, and that's going to vary from machine to machine.

This is a fine example of a well-designed utility that every BC245 and BC780 owner should have. Even better, it's freeware, and Dave has been quite responsive when I had questions. If you want to do some homework on your local system, ID Tracker deserves very serious consideration.

Mike Agner, KA3JJZ
ka3jjz@erols.com

Related link: ID Tracker