Batboard

Hi Folks,

I have a Quantar that I am trying to interface an ID-O-MATIC III to. I have the RDSTAT+ (pin 18) line connected to the COR input of the ID-O-MATIC and the GROUND and RDSTAT- (pin 47) grounded together. I enabled the basic wildcard operations in the Quantar, and when I reboot the Quantar she keys up and stays keyed. Shut it down, removed the interface cable from connector 17, restarted and she still keyed up/stayed keyed. This was using the default wildcard tables as well.

This unit has a wireline interface via the 8 pin connector as well for 4-wire operation as well which must stay in operation unless I move it to the 50 pin connector.

I must be doing something wrong with the software end of the unit, and of course /\/\'s manuals are less than helpful.

Any thoughts?

Is there a reason you are not using the Quantar's internal ability to ID?

This is a long, long story.......

So to make it quick, we dispatch for the entire county both FD and PD. These quantars are specifically for our analog VHF fire side of the system. For whatever reason, for as long as anyone can remember and now have no reason for it to be this way, our quantars have our dispatch frequency in them twice as two seperate channels using two seperate code tables. One is completely CSQ which is where our QCII tones are broadcast. One is completely PL (4Z) where we send all our voice traffic. What was occuring is that the morse ID was set up on the CSQ channel. When we dispatch, we always give a "prealert" such as "XXXX Dispatch is on the air with emergency traffic for XYZ fire department" which goes out over the PL channel. They would then do the QCII tones which would go out over the CSQ side. After the tones the Quantar would switch back to the PL side so they could give out the call info. At that time the Quantar's non-PL channel was inactive, so it would decide to ID and since both channels are the same, it would ID over the voice traffic.

So I went and changed the morse ID to use the PL channel. Well then it was IDing over the tones which was a no-go. My solution initally was to eliminate the non-PL side of things. A good amount of our tones go out over the PL channel anyways as people haved made changes to the ADM and placed them on the wrong frequency. They all work fine, and the only difference anyone would notice is that you'd hear all the tones all the time (which the FD's love, and the other dispatch centers on our channel like as well because they are set up with a 4Z RX PL anyways, they frequently talk over our tones). For whatever reason, this was a no-go per my boss.

The ID-O-MATIC was my second $40 solution for the problem. My thought was that since I could set it to ID every 30 minutes regardless of transmitter use, the ID was less likely to cover or interfere with any transmissions since the Quantars ID a few seconds after the carrier is dropped when the transmitter is being used. So far my idea has worked well, it still covers some messages every now and then, but the ID is now predictable and it doens't ALWAYS cover a tone or voice dispatch like the Quantar's internal one did.

I have been using the ID-O-MATIC in beacon mode for the last week with it interfaced right into the mic port on the front of the Quantar. I would like to get it to be able to play a litte more nicely and utilize the COR functions to have the ID-O-MATIC delay the ID or transmit it early if the transmitter is not in use.

If I had it my way the CSQ channel would go away and we would transmit everything, tones included, with the PL since the Minitors ignore the PL as they monitor CSQ only. But the powers to be don't want this......

jmfirefighter20 wrote:Hi Folks,

I have a Quantar that I am trying to interface an ID-O-MATIC III to. I have the RDSTAT+ (pin 18) line connected to the COR input of the ID-O-MATIC and the GROUND and RDSTAT- (pin 47) grounded together. I enabled the basic wildcard operations in the Quantar, and when I reboot the Quantar she keys up and stays keyed. Shut it down, removed the interface cable from connector 17, restarted and she still keyed up/stayed keyed. This was using the default wildcard tables as well.

This unit has a wireline interface via the 8 pin connector as well for 4-wire operation as well which must stay in operation unless I move it to the 50 pin connector.

I must be doing something wrong with the software end of the unit, and of course /\/\'s manuals are less than helpful.

Any thoughts?

Now that I have a backplane table in front of me, I see the mistake - you tied J17-47 PTT- to ground. It's not RDSTAT- like you thought. RDSTAT- is J17-43 and RDSTAT+ is J17-18. I usually tie J17-18 to J17-32 GRD to provide a COR active low from J17-43.

Hope that helps.

My mistake on the post here, I was using J17-18 RDSTAT+ into the ID O MATIC, and grounded J17-7 (GRND) and J17-43 (RDSTAT-) together.

But either way, when I had the 50-pin connector disconnected, and restarted the Quantar, it immediately keyed up as long as the Wildcard option was enabled........

Well, you could have a hardware failure that you never knew about (kind of unlikely, but possible), or there is something written into the wildcard tables you aren't aware of (most likely - could be a remnant of initial installation or a corruption). Got any spare parts, or another station?

That may be the case with the wildcard tables. I was using the defaut ones from the factory and I find it hard to believe /\/\ would put something like that in there.

I have plenty of other Quantars I can play with, I may go ahead and tinker with one of them.

Thanks