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Mechanica

Ftrunk mpt1327 software

For some time now I have been monitoring a few radio users that use trunking, (Trunking explained) this makes for difficult monitoring as trunked systems have more than one user using the same frequencies used by the user I am interested in monitoring. For some time now I have been aware of a program written by Ian Wraith, which goes under the guise of FTrunk. Now Ftrunk is a program that is capable of monitoring these trunked systems (MPT1327) allowing you to monitor only the user you are interested in monitoring (Also allows you to monitor all users if you so desire).

Who uses trunking?

Apart from law enforcement agencies in the united states (and some in the UK 2 to be exact) which uses a different protocol to mpt1327 the main users of mpt1327 are. In the United Kingdom MPT1327 trunking is used by all Rail companies as well as all Water, Gas and Electricity supply companies.
It is also used by thousands of other companies who use networks run by radio communications companies such as Zycall Ltd and National Band 3 Ltd.
In Australia MPT 1327 trunking is used by the State of Victoria's State Mobile Radio system.

In the UK in the midlands area it is being used also by City centre Retail networks (Sometimes known as shopwatch however all the users of the trunked systems I am aware of go under the guise of Retail Radio).

 

Now if a piece of software interests me I will usually go right out and buy it. So why not FTrunk? It is capable of doing the stuff I want it to do. Well there have been a couple of things that have put me off, the main reason being that it is only available from Australia (Weird that considering the bloke that wrote the program comes from right here in the UK!) The other being the price. $400 odd dollars seems quite steep and a lot of money to send off to some unknown person.

Now what better way than to try a bit of kit before you hand out the ‘ackers to see if it meets your requirements. With a lot of software this is viable but as FTrunk comes with hardware as well as software this is not feasible.

Now I being the owner of this web site and doing people reviews I get to check out the kit before I buy it and in turn can pass the details of my findings on to you, after all I am a scanner enthusiast and I am not making any money promoting the software.

Before I go any further I must state that the hardware loaned to me for the purpose (In this case a modem) of this review is a prototype one and apparently the production models are much neater. In fairness I don't think I would have griped about the aesthetics of the prototype model had it been a production model. The software is however up to date, and as far as I know compatible with most modern versions of windows.

 

 

The prototype Modem

I received the package a couple of days after speaking to Ian, (Note this came from the UK) the full version can be ordered from australia only. However Postage is insured by standard. So if the
package is lost in transit (which has never happened to knowledge) then
you will automatically be sent another unit. So you can't lose money.
Delivery from Australia to the UK takes anywhere between 1 and 3 weeks.

On opening the package I was greeted by a floppy disk with the software loaded, an RS232 cable which fits between the modem and Your Computer, an audio lead which fits between the scanner and the modem (Please do not confuse this with the computer modem I am talking about the modem to drive the software here.) and leads to connect to a discriminator tap if you have one. However I did not try that method. Also a 25-9 pin connector in case your pc does not have the correct serial port size. (Not sure if this is supplied with the production kit and the software I believe is now loaded onto a CD.

To get the software working you must first of all supply some power to the modem this is in the form of a normal household PSU 8-12v Centre positive, however the modem is protected from reverse polarity errors. (In fact the production version can work on either polarity.) A green light will glow on the rear of the modem when power supply is successful.

There is an rs232 connection on the rear of the modem this must be connected to the cable supplied and the other end is connected to a rs232 port on the back of the PC.
Now Off you go and find an mpt1327 control ch this can be heard by the warbling sounds (An example is given with the software if you are not sure what one sounds like) Now open up the software Select network from the menu. For example If it is a Fleetcomm system then select Fleetcomm From the menu at the top of the software , (Again there is a good help file which shows you which systems are likely to be used on what frequencies etc.) Then click main, then connect at this point you will be asked which com port the modem is connected to. If you make the correct selection and the communication between the scanner and the modem is good you should now see some activity, the first will be the system ID in use this will be defined by numbers. If you see this then all is well. After a while depending on the activity on the system (Day times are much busier) You should see instructions being passed for example.
18.42 Prefix#3 Unit 58 calling Unit 56 Goto 182.500 MHz .

To understand this 18.42 being the time, the prefix is the network number, all users on this network will be using this prefix Unit 58 is the radio ID so in this case radio number 58 is calling radio number 56. and they are being told to both work on frequency 182.500. Now a lovely little feature about this software is say you discover the users of radio 58 and radio 56 you can add a name to them so next time you would see for example say it were a taxi co and you discovered the call signs then you could put in Fred’s taxi Number one and Fred’s taxi number 2. Now next time one calls up you would see fred’s taxi number1 calling Fred’s taxi number 2. The options are endless and makes for much easier Identification.

Now then you have all this sussed now and you want to do some serious monitoring. You must now set up another scanner (Yes it can be done by one but we shall cover that later).
The scanner I used to do the monitoring was a Bearcat UBC 780XLT to do this the 780 had to be connected in the normal way to the P. C. with another RS232 cable, this is where I hit my first major snag I paid dearly when I upgraded my machine and bought the best motherboard on the market but I now discovered it only came with one serial port. (Note additional serial ports can be purchased that can be fitted in a spare pci slot)

My way round this was to use my kids P. C. which has two serial ports. To get up and running after following the previous instructions is to click on “Tracking” and you will be met with a drop down list of supported scanners. Now if you have a second scanner that is either a AOR2700, AOR3000, AOR3000A, AOR8000, AOR8200 , Icom PCR1000 ,Icom R10, Icom R7000, Icom R7100 , Icom R8500 , Icom R9000 , Optoelectronics Optocom , Uniden BC245 , Uniden BC780XLT or a WiNRADiO then you are in luck. (Possible support for the uniden digital scanners shortly) FTrunk can control this scanner and tune it to follow voice conversations on the trunked network you are monitoring. To do this first connect your second scanner to your PC (after following the previous). Now click on the Tracking menu's Setup Tracking item. A dialog box will appear which asks which COM port you have connect your scanner to. Select one and click on the OK button. Now tell FTrunk which scanner you are using by selecting the relevant menu item. At this point your scanner should tune to 406.1 MHz NFM mode. If it doesn't tune to this frequency or FTrunk locks up then there is a problem. This is what the help file says but does not give any clue as to what the problem can be. I would suggest checking you re-check your settings because I was caught out a few times by this.

FTrunk tuned to the "quiet" frequency

However if everything is working you should now click on the Enable Full Tracking Menu Item. Now when a frequency appears on your screen FTrunk will tune the scanner to that frequency. As soon as the conversation on that frequency is over your tracking scanner is automatically be retuned to 406.1 MHz (or the quiet frequency you have chosen). Sometimes the frequency the conversation takes place on may contain interference. These would fool FTrunk into thinking the conversation had never ended so it would never return to the quiet frequency. To prevent that happening FTrunk contains a timer which is programmed to always return the tracking scanner to the quiet frequency after 3 minutes.

So That is how it should work in theory but did it work like that in practice? At first it did not but that was down to me making wrong selections when selecting com ports etc. One thing that did peeve me a little was the fact that once it gave me a communications error message it continued to keep giving me several error messages, My trying to shut down the program to get out of it would not work, forcing a ctrl-alt-del end task procedure to get out of it.

 

Once I had done this a few times and got the hang of it I stopped getting these errors and grew to love the program I did hit a slight snag where the software caused my squelch to remain open but a quick email to Ian and he updated the software that cured the problem. To follow conversations you are given a few options from the tracking menu I would advise anyone running this software to start with the “Enable full tracking” option as from here you can slowly identify different users from the Identity numbers coming up. When you start Identifying users you can add them to a file called Track.USR which is a file that can be edited with notepad. When you have a few (Or even one user if you so wish) you can now follow their transmissions whilst filtering out all other users on the network.

When you have done this now may be a good time to add your own tags to individual users radio’s. With this done whenever one user calls another you will see their names on the display on your computer monitor for easy identification.(Incidentally it was nice to see the identity numbers of the units transmitting being displayed on the scanner as well as on the computer monitor) Some of the other features offered by ftrunk is the option to record conversations to disk, so you can go out for the day/night and come back and replay all the action. Alert tones. This can be set on a goto ch command or for a specific user or group ident. I set it for any user that used a “group ident” (Talkgroup as Motorola would call it) I was interested in monitoring. This I found very handy and efficient and the alert tone is not too harsh at all rather like the windows error message sound but softer. From the information menu you can check for signal quality, frequencies that had been used in a session. Also from here is where you add names to different users.

 

Image showing the ftrunk setup the Icom R5 is receiving the data and 780 being used to follow the conversations via the P. C.

From the display menu you can display status codes, data messages, channel numbers, time stamp etc. The thing that amazed me with ftrunk is that you can even see when a user switches on their radio as it registers with the network!!

 

Support for FTrunk is very good. For example lets say you discover a system in your area but find the conversations interesting and would like to monitor them. Also You do not know who is using the system. Help ! The system I wish to monitor is not listed

OK if the system you wish to monitor isn't listed in FTrunk's Network menu item then you can use the Unknown Systems menu item to monitor it. But when a GTC instruction is sent then FTrunk will not say which frequency the voice conversation is going to take place on but will instead say which channel number this occur on.
If you wish to include your trunked system in FTrunk then It is possible to add your own systems to the program using the
"User Defined Channel Table" feature but Ian does prefer if people email him direct
the details also so he can add them to the program.
you need to E mail the channel->frequency table used by the system. For example ..

Channel 5 -> 162.275 Mhz
Channel 6 -> 163.800 Mhz

If you don't know this already then you need to find it using a scanner. To do this start when the system is not very busy (during the early evening is a good time) monitor the control channel using the Unknown Systems menu item. Say a GTC is sent with mobiles going to channel 21 then use your scanner to search approx 2 Mhz above and below the control channel frequency for a frequency being used a voice channel. If you find a channel write down the frequency. Then go back to monitoring the control channel. Next time a mobile is sent to channel 21 quickly tune your scanner to the frequency you found earlier and see if it is in use. If you do this a couple more times you can confirm that the frequency is channel 21.

Now use the same method to find the frequencies of a few more channels. To find the lesser used channels you may have to do this while the network is busy, perhaps during the day. Once you have emailed the previous details then there will be a revision of the software and support will be added for that system from a drop down menu. Now instead of seeing just goto ch number messages you will now see goto frequencies and your second scanner will reaction tune to those frequencies.

So how much does it all cost? The cost of this software after doing a currency conversion from Australian dollars to sterling comes to £166.75 This means it will only be used by the most dedicated of monitors who have an interest in monitoring this system. But in all fairness you are not just paying for software but hardware also. The reason for this price is because of the high cost of the modem parts Not only that but there is now a Yahoo group set up for FTrunk users where you can post any questions or requests for updates to the software to make it more user friendly. I have signed up to this group and all questions have been answered in one way or another very quickly.

During this review several updates have been made in the weeks it has took me to write the review one was a squelch problem with the 780 scanner that has been resolved. Plus more options such as scan conventional ch’s whilst using the software with ftrunk kicking your scanner in should any activity happen on the mpt1327 system/s it is currently monitoring, kind of like a priority feature. At the time of writing this feature is only available to the 780 and AOR 8600 but with plans to add it to the other supported scanners also.

One feature I did not get to try as none of the users in my area appear to use it is the ability to see SDM (Messages) being sent across the network some users such as the Scottish ambulance service send text messages across the radio system and FTrunk can display these messages.

Final thoughts

During the course of this review I grew to really love the features that it offers to the point that I would now feel lost without it. Once I got used to using it I managed to operate it flawlessly, the program is rock solid and does not suffer from crashes. The scanner I left sitting on the data ch showed surprisingly long battery life, this I feared was going to be a constant charge/discharge cycle but this was not the case in fact I got more battery life than when using it for a normal days scanning. I would highly recommend this kit to anyone who seriously wants to monitor a mpt1327 trunked system in their area. This is the only software that is capable and it does it flawlessly and with some great features. Just to point this out several times users messed around on their radios to the fury of the controller as he had no Idea who it was... Guess what? I knew exactly who it was!!

At the time of writing FTrunk is compatible with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 & XP

Supported radios AOR2700, AOR3000, AOR3000A, AOR8000, AOR8200 , Icom PCR1000 ,Icom R10, Icom R7000, Icom R7100 , Icom R8500 , Icom R9000 , Optoelectronics Optocom , Uniden BC245 , Uniden (U)BC780XLT or a WiNRADiO.

If you decide then this kit is for you then visit HERE to purchase I know I will be!