XPR5550 Tone Channelling from CSI?

[TX_Shooter]

(I have no idea what sub-forum I need to pose this question to. Sorry if I put it in the wrong place.)

Anyone here know if it is possible to steer the channeling of an XPR5550 via the tones of a CSI Flex II Universal Radio Adapter? An organization I'm working with has ordered 3 of them (not yet delivered), and they were told that Tone Remote could not channel steer it, but could be used to control it. I don't get that.

Also, anyone know where I can get a pinout of the connectors that would be used for remote usage of it? According to the purchaser, he couldn't find a technical manual of any kind on the Motorola website.

Thanks,
Shooter

[escomm]

XPR5550 supports channel steering. Whether that toy you have can ground the pins to make the channel steer is another story.

The pinout for the accessory connector is in the CPS help file.

Good luck, have fun.

[TX_Shooter]

XPR5550 supports channel steering. Whether that toy you have can ground the pins to make the channel steer is another story.

I think that I've read somewhere (perhaps on a similar model) that this radio uses E&M interfacing to control it, but without a manual, which won't arrive with the physical radio until after we depart from this worksite, I can't really tell.

The pinout for the accessory connector is in the CPS help file.

Where do I find this CPS help file? (I'm just an installer and integrator of equipment that utilizes radio connectivity onto a telephone system, not a Motorola dealer or a direct client.)

Thanks,
Shooter

[Bill_G]

XPR5550 supports channel steering. Whether that toy you have can ground the pins to make the channel steer is another story.

I think that I've read somewhere (perhaps on a similar model) that this radio uses E&M interfacing to control it, but without a manual, which won't arrive with the physical radio until after we depart from this worksite, I can't really tell.

The pinout for the accessory connector is in the CPS help file.

Where do I find this CPS help file? (I'm just an installer and integrator of equipment that utilizes radio connectivity onto a telephone system, not a Motorola dealer or a direct client.)

Thanks,
Shooter

CPS = Customer Programming Software

If you don't have it, you don't have it. A quick Google search yielded nothing, but I have really limited BW where I'm at this week.

[TX_Shooter]

CPS = Customer Programming Software

If you don't have it, you don't have it. A quick Google search yielded nothing, but I have really limited BW where I'm at this week.

Our customer (of the telephone system we're installing) says he has access to the Client Side(?) of the Motorola website. Would he be able to find it there? Or perhaps through his local Motorola dealer? Or is it only available within the box that the radio is shipped in?

Thanks,
Shooter

[TX_Shooter]

Update:
We've spoken with the local Motorola Dealer on this, and they wanted to sell the customer a TRC adapter. Before they commit to purchasing an L3276, we're going to attempt to channel this radio via the CSI, which also has TRC capability. I will update this as soon as we are able to test... probably some time next week.

[wavetar]

Update:
We've spoken with the local Motorola Dealer on this, and they wanted to sell the customer a TRC adapter. Before they commit to purchasing an L3276, we're going to attempt to channel this radio via the CSI, which also has TRC capability. I will update this as soon as we are able to test... probably some time next week.

As long as the CSI unit has binary outputs that mirror the function tone (the tone which indicates what 'channel' to change to) from the tone remote, you shouldn't have too much of an issue. You will definitely need the CPS, or have the dealer rep present with it, since it will be needed to program the needed accessory pins for channel steering.

[TX_Shooter]

As long as the CSI unit has binary outputs that mirror the function tone (the tone which indicates what 'channel' to change to) from the tone remote, you shouldn't have too much of an issue. You will definitely need the CPS, or have the dealer rep present with it, since it will be needed to program the needed accessory pins for channel steering.

I THINK I understand what you're saying. I will say that our CSI unit channel steers the XTL5000 Consolette without a problem (up to the first 8 channels, for some reason it chokes after that). The CSI receives DTMF #1, *1, etc. from our PBX setup, and it then outputs the appropriate High Level and Low Level Guard Tones to key and select the appropriate channel.

[GlennD]

As long as the CSI unit has binary outputs that mirror the function tone (the tone which indicates what 'channel' to change to) from the tone remote, you shouldn't have too much of an issue. You will definitely need the CPS, or have the dealer rep present with it, since it will be needed to program the needed accessory pins for channel steering.

I THINK I understand what you're saying. I will say that our CSI unit channel steers the XTL5000 Consolette without a problem (up to the first 8 channels, for some reason it chokes after that). The CSI receives DTMF #1, *1, etc. from our PBX setup, and it then outputs the appropriate High Level and Low Level Guard Tones to key and select the appropriate channel.

The first channel tones are standard. After that it depends. For example the GE tones are not the same as the Motorola tones. We had a hospital hear system that sent GE tones to an XPR3000. We just programmed the channels to match and it no longer was a linear progression.

[Bill_G]

As long as the CSI unit has binary outputs that mirror the function tone (the tone which indicates what 'channel' to change to) from the tone remote, you shouldn't have too much of an issue. You will definitely need the CPS, or have the dealer rep present with it, since it will be needed to program the needed accessory pins for channel steering.

I THINK I understand what you're saying. I will say that our CSI unit channel steers the XTL5000 Consolette without a problem (up to the first 8 channels, for some reason it chokes after that). The CSI receives DTMF #1, *1, etc. from our PBX setup, and it then outputs the appropriate High Level and Low Level Guard Tones to key and select the appropriate channel.

What he's saying is the XPR uses binary encoding to channel select through the accy plug. Without the manual, I don't know if it's four bit or what, but let's assume four bit since it's fairly common. And I don't know if you take a line to ground or set it high to select it. Let's assume ground, and let's assume grounding a line equals a one to make it easy to understand. So, you ground line 1, leave the others open, giving a binary address of 0001, which translates into channel 1 on the radio. Ground the second line for an address of 0010 to select the second channel. Ground lines one and two for 0011 to select channel 3. etc, etc, yada yada yada. You get the picture. Right on up to channel 16 because we only have four bits.

You may want the dealer to sell them his remote adapter since he probably knows about the binary inputs.

[Bill_G]

Read this thread on the L3276.

[TX_Shooter]

What he's saying is the XPR uses binary encoding to channel select through the accy plug. Without the manual, I don't know if it's four bit or what, but let's assume four bit since it's fairly common. And I don't know if you take a line to ground or set it high to select it. Let's assume ground, and let's assume grounding a line equals a one to make it easy to understand. So, you ground line 1, leave the others open, giving a binary address of 0001, which translates into channel 1 on the radio. Ground the second line for an address of 0010 to select the second channel. Ground lines one and two for 0011 to select channel 3. etc, etc, yada yada yada. You get the picture. Right on up to channel 16 because we only have four bits.

Whooaaaa.... Ok. Looks like I did misunderstand then. My bad.

I wasn't aware of that kind of channel steering, binary bit-lines, and now it makes sense what the dealer was saying that it "sort of could do channel steering". Now I see why the dealer was offering up the L3276, otherwise it would take us adding a second 'channeling' line out of the PBX and installing a DTMF-to-Relay decoder to translate to the correct 'bits'.

Bill, thanks for clarifying. My job just got a little more interesting, and complicated. We may not have this up and running by the original 'cut-over' date of this coming Friday... our customer doesn't even have these radios in their possession yet.

-Shooter

[TX_Shooter]

Wait, wait, wait, wait.... I just remembered... Our Siemens system employs the use of a 24 channel relay control board. The first 8 are being used to key these (plus others) radios, the next 4 are for ancillary controls, leaving 12 relays not used. Our programmer should be able to program the next 6 relays (2 per radio for 2 bit-lines (0=00, 1=01, 2=10, 3=11)) in order to get the 4 channels each radio is capable of transmitting on... a 'softkey' on the user's console can be macro-programmed to output the correct sequence of bits prior to keying the radio using the traditional PTT-to-Ground signal. Problem solved, no? (And we already have this capability installed... no additional equipment necessary for the base to purchase, which would be on next year's federal budget.)

The only thing that I don't know is the pins for these 'bit-line' inputs, and the actual binary representation of the channels, as well as the 'reference' pin (Gnd or DC?). Anyone got any pointers here?

[wavetar]

I nice pinout of the XPR5550 accessory connector can be seen here:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=xpr5550+ ... B605%3B477

The "GP5_x" pins are the programmable pins, I believe any of which can be set for channel steering. You can choose active hi or low, so that's no issue.

One potential issue in your proposed 2-relay setup is that I don't believe the radio will recognize "00" as being channel 1...I believe it needs to see "01"...so that limits you to three channels. But, I'm not 100% on that.

[TX_Shooter]

The "GP5_x" pins are the programmable pins, I believe any of which can be set for channel steering. You can choose active hi or low, so that's no issue.

One potential issue in your proposed 2-relay setup is that I don't believe the radio will recognize "00" as being channel 1...I believe it needs to see "01"...so that limits you to three channels. But, I'm not 100% on that.

We ended up doing something pretty much like that, Wavetar. The dealer set up those pins as active low inputs, but it wasn't quite as cut-n-dry as a binary setup. Since we could only use 3 pins with reference to the radio's ground to do the channel steering (a limitation set forth by the number of wires between buildings), we found the following truth table applied:

Pin x = Channel "2" Select
Pin y = Channel "3" Select
Pin z = Channel "4" Select"

With Channel "1" being none of the pins grounded (this was tested on the bench and it worked).

With more wires and relays, I'm sure that we could've channeled all of the available 12+ channels that the dealer programmed into this radio, but this worked out for our purpose.

We did find that if you grounded more than one pin at a time, it sort of 'shifted' to a completely different channel, but it wasn't something that we could sort out completely with the time that we had, and not all input pins were assigned. One complaint that I have about these radios is that we didn't really have that "Channel 1 = "Local Police Repeater"", "Channel 2 = "Local Police Talk Around"", etc., etc. that you might see in other radios. These were programmed in somewhat of a non-sequential order.

All in all though, we muddled through it as best as we could with what little information we could find, and made it work to the customer's needs and satisfactions.

Thanks,
-Shooter