A Question Regarding ASTRO Equipment and Analog Equipment

[motofreak008]

Some of you may have noticed in my other post that the department that I work for is upgrading to 800 mhz. It has been a cluster so far. Somehow it wasn't discovered until the install guys came that electrical work was needing to be done for the consoles. So that was a delay, and a delay we are still working on. Mind you the transition was supposed to occur in June. So, for some reason, instead of waiting, 800 mhz mobiles were installed in the vehicles, leaving the police, sheriff and fire using portables when they went out. Well, the sheriff's office (SO) got impatient and switched to all 800 mhz radios, and we had to dispatch over a portable radio, a huge pain in the @$$. But, the PD and FD are still only on their portables, another pain. So, now about a few weeks before the new consoles are going to be installed, someone finally gets the idea to use 800 mhz as control stations for the consoles we have now, Orbacom TDM 150. It has been working, but it hasn't even been 24 hours yet. But, we still page our FDs over VHF pagers, but we were told something about simulcasting and such. It's hard to explain, so I'll show you part of the e-mail that was sent out.

800mhz radios do not transmit pages (tones) thus when paging something that requires FD response, we need to simulcast both “GCFD PAGERS” and “GCFD 800” modules. So when we do the daily Fire Pager tests, simul both on our consoles. We can no longer do the shortcut at 1200 and 1900 to set off both HFD and GCFD pagers before we transit the call letters. We need to do them separately so they receive the voice transmission. Because when there is a long pause between the actual page and the voice, the pagers “time-out” and will not carry our voice transmission. So doing the pages separately seems to work the best.

What do think, is it right? I really don't see why we need to test the radios when it is a pager test. What we used to do is simul HFD and GCFD, send out both tones, and quickly give the test one after the other. It worked well, and now it supposedly won't work. Why?

[maverick15951]

to be honest this problem could be fixed very easily by reprogramming the fire pagers for a longer reset delay but as for simul-selecting the paging the best bet would be to setup a pre set simulselect on the console and send the tones over the conventional analog then hit the simulselect and put out the message... this would take some training with the dispatchers to get it down to a science but i am assuming the problem lies with the console dropping and reenabling the simul-select between the tones... in short dont simul-select until the tones are done... also no tones are supposed to be sent over 800 mhz per fcc ruling's... noone follows that rule though...

[motofreak008]

The tones aren't sent over 800 mhz. They are still sent over VHF pagers, but for some reason the fire dept here thinks they are special and wants the page over their radio and pager. They only receive voice over the radio, no tones. Honestly, I haven't even listened to this, I still do it the same way, when I test that is, I still send both pages over, but make them quick and go to the other channels. Personally I don't think we should simul over the radios, they have pagers to get the page, the radios are to talk. EMS hasn't gone to 800 mhz yet, we are still in the middle of getting dispatch over to MCC7500s still, so not everyone has made the transition yet, but EMS still gets all of their pages from their pagers without simuling over their radio channel.

[KB2ZTX]

There is no reason your tones can't go over the 800. Currently our couny does this over 3 systems, lowband, UHF and 800 Mhz Edacs with no issues. The dispatcher knows nothing other than CH1 Fire and that is the only button they push. all else is done in a back room. Now in another county we have a Orbacom and they do mute the tones on 800 but have no issues on sending them. thye have been doing it for 10 years...

[motofreak008]

The radio tech here says that the MCC7500 won't page over trunking channels. I think it would be nice to just send the tones over the radios and page that way instead of carrying VHF pagers. I think I might try to set up the manual page next time I dispatch fire and EMS and go over the 800 mhz radio and see if it will send it out. I just have a problem of trying to explain it to someone higher up that I did my own checking to find out it actually worked, without getting in trouble.

[Jim202]

You haven't mentioned anything yet about how your going to interface to conventional analog channels. By
any chance has Motorola included one or more CCGW routers into the system? These will provide 4 ports of
an analog interface that can be used to control by tone remote control any base radio you desire to connect
to them.

Jim

The radio tech here says that the MCC7500 won't page over trunking channels. I think it would be nice to just send the tones over the radios and page that way instead of carrying VHF pagers. I think I might try to set up the manual page next time I dispatch fire and EMS and go over the 800 mhz radio and see if it will send it out. I just have a problem of trying to explain it to someone higher up that I did my own checking to find out it actually worked, without getting in trouble.

[motofreak008]

Yea, pretty sure I have heard them talking about CCGWs. I haven't been able to talk to them much about what is going on now, between my job and all. But I do know that there are 24 backup 800mhz radios in case we lose our connection with the state network, and all 24 radios are operated with tone remotes.