The Future of Paging and P25
Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 10:29 pm
The company I work for is in the middle of upgrading a county in the area to a P25 simulcast system piggy-backing off of the state system. The customer ordered the Digital Tone Signalling option on the radios for fire and EMS as they were told by the salesperson that it would work, even though none of the service techs had even heard of the option before. I did get to take some time and figured out how to program it in and how it works and color me impressed. All these years of hearing how P25 paging wasn't going to be a thing and Motorola had no interest in developing it.
There were a few quirks trying to get it to act like one would expect and one complaint I have is that instead of a Page channel, the receiver doesn't open until the proper page sequence, you have to have a button programmed to Voice Mute. I'm a firefighter/paramedic so I have plenty of user experience as well and personally I would prefer the channel option over the Voice Mute button. I feel like it's easier to bump a button to turn off the mute than it would be to change the channel and a lot of firefighters and EMTs carry radios that have a page channel in them already, so they're pretty used to changing channels when they get a call.
So far testing seems to work well, we even were able to get a Unication G4 to work but more on that later, granted it's only on the bench and during the day. I'm just looking at starting some dialogue on what the future plans for P25 may be and if there's any word of a /\/\ pager that will be P25 capable? I'm sure you all have heard about it, but there is quite a demand for them. In my department some people prefer to carry just a radio while others would like to keep their radios in their vehicle and just carry a pager and then others don't care and carry both, especially now since we are already on the state system.
Now about that G4. I've gotta say, I'm not impressed. Motorola's software can be confusing at times, but this software is on another level. It just doesn't come across as very friendly and just seems so clutter. It's colorful, no doubt, but at first glance it just seems like too much to take in at once. And then trying to navigate around get it programmed is a chore of its own. It took us awhile to figure out to get it to go off with QCII and not their talkgroup alert. (I mean come on how well did they honestly think that would work and go over with system admins? One talkgroup per dept with the pager going off every time it hears traffic? For a few hundred dollars less I can buy a portable scanner that will alert when there's traffic on a talkgroup.) Once that was figured out after getting the instructions emailed to us by Unication and trying to decipher their help files, the next challenge was the alert tone. O M G. For whatever reason, I couldn't get it to change and the default tone that sounds like a smoke alarm was VERY obnoxious, but the other tech tried something and got them to change. There were many other cons about it, but I don't wanna completely trash them here, unless you wanna hear more and then I'll challenge myself to get it all typed in the time it takes for it to boot up and find the system to scan.
But let's get some dialogue going here, I'm very curious to know if Motorola has plans to get a P25 pager out there and some other thoughts on the topic.
There were a few quirks trying to get it to act like one would expect and one complaint I have is that instead of a Page channel, the receiver doesn't open until the proper page sequence, you have to have a button programmed to Voice Mute. I'm a firefighter/paramedic so I have plenty of user experience as well and personally I would prefer the channel option over the Voice Mute button. I feel like it's easier to bump a button to turn off the mute than it would be to change the channel and a lot of firefighters and EMTs carry radios that have a page channel in them already, so they're pretty used to changing channels when they get a call.
So far testing seems to work well, we even were able to get a Unication G4 to work but more on that later, granted it's only on the bench and during the day. I'm just looking at starting some dialogue on what the future plans for P25 may be and if there's any word of a /\/\ pager that will be P25 capable? I'm sure you all have heard about it, but there is quite a demand for them. In my department some people prefer to carry just a radio while others would like to keep their radios in their vehicle and just carry a pager and then others don't care and carry both, especially now since we are already on the state system.
Now about that G4. I've gotta say, I'm not impressed. Motorola's software can be confusing at times, but this software is on another level. It just doesn't come across as very friendly and just seems so clutter. It's colorful, no doubt, but at first glance it just seems like too much to take in at once. And then trying to navigate around get it programmed is a chore of its own. It took us awhile to figure out to get it to go off with QCII and not their talkgroup alert. (I mean come on how well did they honestly think that would work and go over with system admins? One talkgroup per dept with the pager going off every time it hears traffic? For a few hundred dollars less I can buy a portable scanner that will alert when there's traffic on a talkgroup.) Once that was figured out after getting the instructions emailed to us by Unication and trying to decipher their help files, the next challenge was the alert tone. O M G. For whatever reason, I couldn't get it to change and the default tone that sounds like a smoke alarm was VERY obnoxious, but the other tech tried something and got them to change. There were many other cons about it, but I don't wanna completely trash them here, unless you wanna hear more and then I'll challenge myself to get it all typed in the time it takes for it to boot up and find the system to scan.
But let's get some dialogue going here, I'm very curious to know if Motorola has plans to get a P25 pager out there and some other thoughts on the topic.