Scanner Info

Newaygo County's public safety communications are on the Michigan Public Safety Communications System. (MPSCS) Newaygo County's communications are digital, not encrypted. You need a specific type of scanner to listen in on what is going on. You need a scanner capable of APCO25 800MHz digital. There are also scanners listed as APCO25 Phase 2 (or II), these will also work. Another option for monitoring is a Unicaiton G4 or G5 pager.

The best place I have found to find what is currently available scanner wise that will work in this area is the Scanner Master website. All of the scanners listed here as Digital P25 Phase II scanners will work. Most of the scanners listed in their digital scanner page will also work. The Unication G4 and G5 pagers also work very well for monitoring MPSCS, but they tend to be a lot harder to initially set up, and are not quite as good as scanners scanning wise. They are designed as pagers, not scanners, although Unication has been releasing new software features to make them better for general scanning. A good place to get Unication pagers is Ray's Pager Sales or any other authorized Unication dealer.

Programming wise, it is fairly easy to get started. Basically you need the primary control frequencies for the 3 towers in Newaygo County, which can be found on the radio reference website. The site names you are looking for are: White cloud, Hesperia and Bitely. The red listed frequency is the primary control channel. You create a P25 system in the scanner with these 3 sites, and you will start hearing all of the radio chatter that passes trough our county. On the same page you can find the talkgroup id's which you can program in to help identify what agency you are listening to at any point. Keep in mind this is a state wide system, so you will hear communications from more than just Newaygo County. But, you will not hear everything in the state. To more efficiently utilize resources, the P25 system will only broadcast radio traffic on towers that have an actual radio logged into the tower. (called Affiliated in radio geek) Most of our surrounding counties are also using or are switching over to this system soon.

Newaygo Counties fire dispatch is still on analog VHF. You can listen to fire dispatch on 154.385. You should be able to get this with any scanner on the market, including old scanners. You can also listen to Newaygo Counties fire dispatch with many popular scanner apps on your phone, or by visiting www.broadcastify.com and selecting Newaygo County. Currently, Newaygo Counties digital radio traffic is not rebroadcast online.

Ham Radio

There are 2 ham radio repeaters in Newaygo County, the Fremont 146.920 and White Cloud 145.450 repeaters. The Fremont 92 repeater is an analog VHF wideband repeater with a input PL of 94.8 and an output PL if 107.2. This repeater is located on a 192 foot tower on the east end of Fremont. It is a Motorola MTR2000 repeater connected to a CAT1000 repeater controller. The White Cloud repeater is a digital Yaesu System Fusion repeater. A UHF, DMR digital repeater is in the works for Fremont, but it is not on the air yet. This will be connected to the Central Michigan Emergency Network. Stay tuned for updates!