One thing I've found RX PL for is on both the police and fire
frequencies, the very loud and obnoxious repeater ID is not
transmitted with tone. So if you are kind of dozing off and all
of a sudden you hear this dit dah dit dit dit dah dah dti dit
at about 100 decibels, listening with PL or DCS decode is
a must. Also like me with a high gain antenna 20 feet above the roof
I get other municipalities on one fire frequency. I don't want to hear
fire dispatch 50 miles away. especially when it's a big city and dispatch
is very active. So our FD for the county is on a unique tone and
listening using PL decode is also a must. One more reason is
even in amateur bands when the conditions are right we get
several VE repeaters. We then can turn on decode and the repeater
operator will turn encode on the output. So just to plain listen, no
you don't need to use PL. But on shared frequencies or repeater ID
that you don't want to hear or the VE DX, you have to use it.
From: Jim Unroe <rock.unroe@gmail.com>
To: Discussion of CHIRP <chirp_users@intrepid.danplanet.com>
Sent: Friday, December 6, 2013 7:54 AM
Subject: Re: [chirp_users] Programming PL
into UV-5R