Batboard

Before I start programming litterally thousands of ID's, Is there a "variable" that can be used in astro signaling / mdc call ID?

Example: I live and work in a place where units are dispatched on a county wide basis using 1 frequency. This frequency is an astro25 frequency. Each unit is assigned a radio id. The first digit of the id represents the county, the second and third digit represent the town, and the last three digits represent unit type and number, for a total of 6 digits. Instead of programing in the astro25 cps 111001 = town 11, 111002 = town 1, etc, etc, etc I would like to program 111*** = town 11 (where * is the variable).



Thanks for the help

JT

Sorry, In the original post "town 1" should say "town 11", as any ID 111*** where * = any number is assigned to county 1 town 11. The ID 211*** is assigned to the 11th town in county 2, etc. Here is the corrected original post....

Before I start programming litterally thousands of ID's, Is there a "variable" that can be used in astro signaling / mdc call ID?

Example: I live and work in a place where units are dispatched on a county wide basis using 1 frequency. This frequency is an astro25 frequency. Each unit is assigned a radio id. The first digit of the id represents the county, the second and third digit represent the town, and the last three digits represent unit type and number, for a total of 6 digits. Instead of programing in the astro25 cps 111001 = town 11, 111002 = town 11, etc, etc, etc I would like to program 111*** = town 11 (where * is the variable).



Thanks for the help

JT

You don't mention which radios you're talking about, and different CPSs have different features.

As far as I know, there's no feature in the CPS that can segregate the digits of the Astro25 or MDC ID into separately programmed subfields. However, if it's the low order digits you're changing, the "clone" feature of most CPSs (XTS and APX, at least) will let you auto-increment the IDs on each successively programmed radio, which might make it easier to do what you're trying to do.

I believe the OP is asking if *wildcard* entries can be used and I believe the answer is no?

Andrew

Ah, I see I may have misunderstood the question. Just to be clear, you're wanting to send a "multicast" message to a subset of radios, based on a subset of digits their IDs? No, you can't do that with the MDC or P25 IDs, as far as I know. But P25 talkgroups may be able to accomplish something similar, if you want to allow radios to stay muted except for calls to their group. Can you explain again the scenario you're thinking about?

Absolutely, and thank you both for your responses. I was starting to figure no responses meant no, but I wasn't sure why someone who knows this stuff very well wasn't saying no. Also thank you may for your original post. If I am reduced to doing this by hand (figuratively speaking) then I will look for that feature and use it.

Here is the scenario:

I have a number of Astro25 radios (XTS2500s, XTL5000s, and a couple others)
The state where I live and work (one of them anyway) organizes departments by county. All police dept in the county use the came frequency and dispatch center. As a result, there are two ways to know what town is talking / dispatched to a call / etc. The first would be to memorize all of the car numbers (as each town is assigned 20 - 100 car number depending on the county. The second way, is through the Astro25 signaling ID that each radio transmits.
For example, in county "A" each town is numbered 1-99 (or 1 - the number of the last town). When a radio transmits, It sends a 6 digit ID. The format for the ID is |1 digit county number| |2 digit town number| |1 digit department type| |2 digit unit number|
This comes out looking something like 826104 - where 8 is county "A", 26 is town "springfield", 1 is a police dept, and 04 is the unit number for that department.
I only want to program the call ID for these IDs. I do not need to broadcast to them or anything like that. When I am called I talk to dispatch and later incident command or others working the seen. everyone can hear what everyone says and that is all fine. I just need to know what department is talking, when they talk, so that I can get an idea if I am going to be requested to a scene and if so where. This is extremely helpful, especially if it is far away, or I am out with my wife, so I can start planning to get back home if needed, drop off my wife, make sure I have my partner ready and with me, and have any special supplies of equipment that I may need depending on the weather and conditions. I can also go over my notes that relate to this particular call and start putting together a plan in my head (how many teams I will need, how the work will be divided up, etc etc etc)
So.... The simplest / easiest / best way to do this would be to program the "call ID" in the CPS with a wild card (e.g. 824*** = "Springfield" so 824*** would display "Springfield" for any id between 824000 and 824999 (I don't believe that Astro25 signaling is hex)) or if there was a way to define a group call ID (so that I could define the group as any ID between 824000 and 824999 and call the group "Springfield," with the same result as previous).
Anything similar to this would be great.

Thanks again

Jt

Ah, got it now. I thought you were designing a system or trying to program a bunch of radios for a large system. I see that this is just about how you display ASTRO25 IDs on your radios.

So what you want is to be able to run the received ID through some kind of regular expression -based filter and display information about which of several systems the ID came from. That would be a neat feature. Sadly, unless there's some secret hidden functionality in the XTS/XTL CPS of which I'm unaware, there's no obvious way to do this.

Ok. Thanks anyway. There is always the old fashioned way of going ID by ID by ID.

Jt