Marks & Spencer store closures an unexpected result

[Metradio]

My local Marks & Spencer store in Slough is closing down within the next month. Now apart from having to go to Tesco for a little bit of shopping it should have no effect on me, certainly not on my scanner listening .... WRONG .... It turns out quite a few Town Shop and Pub Watches have their repeater and antenna on M&S property.. My local Shop Watch was on UHF analogue on it's own frequency of 456.525MHz on the M&S building, within a week of the M&S announcement the Shop Watch was on DMR sharing the local Queensmere/Observatory shopping mall's repeater on 456.3375MHz atop the Queensmere building..

Mike

[Scott_93]

As users start switching to DMR for whatever reason, expect to see more sharing due to the extra capacity they get.

Near me (Manchester and general North West) this is happening more and more. One repeater got put up on a high building in part of the city centre for the local CCTV (again, only for a small area of the city centre). Since then there's at least two other talkgroups appeared on the second slot for other users.

It makes sense to put small users on the extra capacity that's going to waste and capitalise on sharing the licensing costs, plus the extra features that users gain.

On the other side, there's quite a few users up here that have repeaters with tremendous coverage that never use more than one talkgroup on one slot

Sadly though, pretty much everything up here has gone over to DMR, thankfully in the clear without encryption with the odd dashings of RAS here and there.

Scott.

[Admiral]

Looking at your sig it's not a problem for you, in fact, maybe a bonus. My local SW/PW was very cagey when on analogue, a message on analogue would be "control to all units, target 12 at today's briefing has just left Papa-Papa-1 and is located outside Papa-Lima-1", Since they have gone digital they seem to think that they are completely private, so the message now would be, "Control to all units, our old mate Bill Bloggs has just come out of Paddy Power and is currently smoking a fag outside of Poundland".

[Metradio]

Oh yes certainly a bonus..

Mike