Batboard

The PD here just did the infrastructure upgrades for their super-super-waste-of-town-money P25 "upgrade". It's a Quantar and AstroTAC voting system on conventional UHF. Now there are these random beeping noises during transmissions. There is no timing or pattern. They low level, low enough to not overpower the voice. Sometimes it is just a little beep. Sometimes it is a double-beep. They are all high pitch.

What is that and what did they screw up to have it come over the air?

Usually they are fail/trouble/on batt backup warning tones.

Pj wrote:Usually they are fail/trouble/on batt backup

None of which would surprise me in the least bit knowing that system.

There are four possible alarm tones (all 125 msec durations of 1200 Hz):

one beep = Battery revert (AC power lost);
two beeps = PA fail (either entirely or not up to full power);
three beeps = synthesizer unlock (either on Tx or Rx); and
four beeps = overvoltage (refers to battery charging voltage if the battery charge option is installed).

"The alarm tones occur during a repeating 10 second window, with 2 seconds between successive alarms (whem more than one alarm is active)." So if, for example, only the synthesizer alarm condition was active, you would hear three short beeps at the beginning of the 10-second interval, followed by about 9=1/2 seconds of quiet, and then the cycle would repeat. If there were two alarms (say battery revert and synthesizer unlock), you'd hear: one beep, two seconds of silence, three beeps, then about 7 seconds of silence.

Depending on programming of the station, the alarm beeps may go over the air, over the wireline to the console, or both. The alarms are for alerting only; if you suspect a failure, the best thing to do is to read the LEDs on the front of the station's SCM or run the status and diagnostic screens via RSS.

Don't know if this level of detail helps.

Oh yea, that is exactly what it is doing. Comes as no surprise. After hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on upgrades and 10 years of this thing being in operation, it's nice to see that they STILL haven't figured out how the power supply works.

Alrighty. Now it is beeping for battery, PA failure, and Synth Unlock. I don't know how this thing is even still working.

Hi Y'all,

I have seen a Quantar that occasionally produced odd beeps at seemingly random intervals. It had been subjected to a number of power "bumps" and glitches - a full power-down reset fixed it.

73 DE Hartley

Their entire system is a long series of bumps and glitches.

nmfire10 wrote:Their entire system is a long series of bumps and glitches.

Thats called the CW ID.