Batboard

I have Kenwood TK3402 and TK3360 radios as well as a new XPR7550. While slowly migrating to an all Motorola solution (Digital with Digital ID's) the Kenwoods will need to send MDC ID's. The TK 3360's are only a few months old so I will have them for a few years anyway. I am trying to get the Kenwood's to ID on the Motorola. I cannot get the Kenwood's MDC ID to decode on the Motorola. I am able to get another Motorola to send an ID and the XPR will decode it. It just will not decode the Kenwood. I sent the data file (codeplug) to Kenwood and their best answer was we loaded it here and it will ID to another Kenwood so it must be a Motorola problem.

Questions are:
Do Kenwood radios transmit an MDC that can be decoded by the Motorola or does it need something more "universal" like a console or cimarron type decoder?
Is there something setting that needs to changed in the programming of either the Kenwood or the Motorola that is allowing each to ID to its own brand but not each other?
Thanks for any help!

I have a mix of TK-5220s and XTLs. I see MDCs IDs on all the radios, including the Man Downs.

You sure you don't have Fleetsync enabled?

Most kenwoods primarily do FleetSync which sounds vaguely like MDC but is a lot shorter and less sharp. Both of those radios should do MDC just fine, so odds are you've got them doing fleetsync instead.

That is unless of course Kenwood's implementation of MDC is just that horrid that Motos won't even pick them up.

W3AXL wrote:That is unless of course Kenwood's implementation of MDC is just that horrid that Motos won't even pick them up.

That's entirely not the case here, as mentioned above.

FLEETSYNC IS DEFINITELY NOT ENABLED ANYWHERE IN THIS RADIO! This has even been verified by Kenwood.

I do believe it could just be crappy Kenwoods. I haven't really found anybody with a good solution and most people using the Kenwoods seem to just like them in defiance to Moto, which I also get. I feel its kind of like apples and PCs. They all crash at some point.

We have a mix of radio brands in our system, I haven't heard of any problem with Kenwood MDC being decoded.

I would look at the settings, such a preamble length and pre-time.
Put one of the Motorolas in monitor mode with squelch running and see if you hear the ID from the Kenwood. Compare it to the ID you get from another Motorola. If pre-time is set too short it can cut off the beginning of the ID, especially when going through a repeated/trunked/voted system.