Batboard

GUYS
Have any of you had experience installing and or using any of these new consoles? We are looking to upgrade and our M rep tells us that the gold elite is NLA. I hear that the new console is compact as far as the CEB ect goes, but a rep will tell you anything you want to hear.

We were informed that the Elite is ONLY avail for a trunked system as the MCC wont do trunking....yet. The MCC is a conventional only. Heard that the Motorola Roadshow in Indiana.

Matt N3IVK

We just completed installing a brand new MCC5500 system with 3 operator positions at the Palm Beach International Airport (FL). The consoles communicate to a Moto. SmartZone system and have the capabilty of displaying Unit ID's and Emergency Calls in addition to other console capabilities such as patching in a wireless environment.

If a salesman is telling you it won't work in a trunked environment, he don't know enough about his product. Also the Gold Elite is still available.

ks4ve and others

are there any advantages to using the mcc5500 to the gold elite? The gols elite has been in service for many years and the buggs are pretty much out. when you guys in FL chose that mcc5500 what was the overriding factor(s)?

thanks

I have installed 3 5500 consoles. Pain in the butt. If you have doors with external relays, you will have to install diodes to protect the I/O boxes. Upgrades take the whole system down.
Gold Elites are only for Trunking Systems now. I heard if your doing an upgrade it might be possible.

I heard from a good feind at a lcal M shop that the 5500's are a pain in the rump. He said that they are in no way as proven as the gold elites. He said that we should still be abel to upgrade our CCII to a gold elite even though all our cards are A-Revisions. Baring that he reccomend the Zetron 4000 series over the 5500's and this guy is a tried and true moto tech from the days of dragnet!! He said that the 5500's are produced by the same outfit that unleashed the command star on unsusepcting buyers. If we ever get money for this equipmenti think Zetron is the better value in my opinion

Bottom line...MCC5500 is for CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS ONLY....The current system for trunking is still Centracom Gold Elite...the replacement for that will be the MCC7500. The 7500 will be almost fully IP based...which means no more CEB in the back room. The 5500 still requires some CEB equipment, although from what I understand it's significantly reduced from the CCII days...I'll admit I don't have all the info on that.

Do not confuse this with the fact the MCC5500 will interface to discrete trunking base station radios as it does with conventional units...it does NOT offer full trunking capability like the ELITE does or the future 7500 series will.

Todd

Radiogeek97 wrote:I heard from a good feind at a lcal M shop that the 5500's are a pain in the rump. He said that they are in no way as proven as the gold elites. He said that we should still be abel to upgrade our CCII to a gold elite even though all our cards are A-Revisions. Baring that he reccomend the Zetron 4000 series over the 5500's and this guy is a tried and true moto tech from the days of dragnet!! He said that the 5500's are produced by the same outfit that unleashed the command star on unsusepcting buyers. If we ever get money for this equipmenti think Zetron is the better value in my opinion

CML Emergency Technologies out of Canada makes the MCC 5500. A lot of the terminology is exactly the same as the command stars.

The one so far I've worked on has been fairly reliable. Run into one issue where the thing dropped keying tones on one channel for no aparent reason. Kind of un nerving when the base station it affects is clear on the other side of the county and you need to make a decision where to go to check first. Downloading and re-uploading the current config fixed the problem, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. No errors on the CSDM PC about it deciding to randomly drop the tones either.

This one is a 2 op, 3 CES setup.

Kurt

The MCC5500 istrunking capable and has a number of the feature sets of the Gold Elite.

It is manufactured by Genesis under a license from Motorola. It is the same system that I have had in service for over a year now at the location I posted above. Here is the website for the unit in different flavors along with pricing:

http://www.genesisworld.com/GEnSAC/Default.htm

Radiogeek97 wrote:ks4ve and others

are there any advantages to using the mcc5500 to the gold elite? The gols elite has been in service for many years and the buggs are pretty much out. when you guys in FL chose that mcc5500 what was the overriding factor(s)?

thanks

Whoops...sorry I missed the question for so long. We wanted to get away from not having to put in T-1 lines to connect to the AEB and the overall cost was lower so it made for an attractive package for a non-911 center that basicially manages the operations of the airport but still maintain the alias and emergency button capabilities. The removal of the T-1 requirement is the only real plus.

Currently there is a local PD that is migrating to 813A and they are doing the same. They had dispatch staff evaluate the system a few months ago and decided that it met their expectations and functionality as well as minimal maintenance issues of the system over all. The only pain is the manual updating of the alias database vs doing it over the CDB network.

KS4VT wrote:The MCC5500 istrunking capable and has a number of the feature sets of the Gold Elite.

It is manufactured by Genesis under a license from Motorola. It is the same system that I have had in service for over a year now at the location I posted above. Here is the website for the unit in different flavors along with pricing:

http://www.genesisworld.com/GEnSAC/Default.htm

http://206.191.61.200/forms/index.asp?d ... 388&lang=e

The actual MCC5500 is made by CML Emergency Services.

Looks like the GenSAC is an alias database server that replaces an AEB.

The MCC should support trunking as well, although motorola isn't marketing it for that yet. You need digital DAPs to control the XTL series and the CDM1550 series via serial. But the nice thing if you do this you get a whole lot more features than just with the analog DAPs

Kurt

OK...so I stand corrected that GenSAC allows the MC5500 console to be trunking capable. Interseting enough that while Moto. isn't marketing it, I did buy it direct from Moto. and it wasn't a SP.

Thanks for the correction Kurt.

Has an update been released for the MCC5500 yet? I need an alert tone when receiving ASTRO status messages. ASTRO call gives a series of tones, but status is silent, utterly useless, dispatcher does not reliably see it.

Well I'm getting my feet wet with one of many of these and have seen some interesting question arise along the way,

First, the install has 13 XTL5k consoletts with what I beleive is the g80 option for the W7 control head, so as I read the CSDM manual. It translates it that, the XTL always stays a W9, (the ONLY configuration of consolette which will interface with the MCC5500), but you can put a W7 control head on it for "back room control and operation" ? Does this sound right?
Thought the Model info would restrict such a thing, . . . . I guess that why I'm asking the question, duh.

Second, in the configuration of using a XTL5k consolette for the TX / RX radio / system access to the ASTRO system, you *CANNOT* reliably receive all emergency calls ( i'm too *insert* to handle this call by my self ) button, due to the XTL5000's inablility to constantly monitor a trunking control channel (requirement in accurate interseption) for and when an Emergency button is pushed, if the transceiver is in either TX or RX mode this would block monitoring the control channel. Does that sound about right? Thats my interpretation.

CoM

Full system was turned on @ 0300 hrs and it had its faults, console kept keying up multiple channels at once and needed to be restored three times in a 2 hour period. Turns out some of the DAP cards are having communication issues with the CES. But then again we are using W7 consolettes with some hope it will work.
Wish we had more to work with, but thats what we got. Audio levels are somewhat low all across the system, we are working to adjust that. The MCC5500 is for sure not a turn key fire up and let go for Astro Trunking.


CoM