Batboard

You may remember my threads about coping with an improperly designed system during a big storm back in October. The short version, I didn't think the system was designed properly and was destined to have a big failure. That failure happened soon after.
http://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=80326

So about a week or two ago, I re-evaluated all the stuff to see what has been changed and what hasn't. The fixed the main/backup steering. But there was still no way to do over-the-air setup and knockdown of either station with DTMF. I reiterated this to the supervisors. If the phone lines to both sites or the astrotac fail, the entire thing will be dead in the water. Nothing will work. We need OTA setup and knockdown to put one of the stations into in-cabinet and we need control stations to make use of it. This applies to both the police and the ems systems (identical /\/\ systems).

Well this afternoon a DSX cross-connect failed at our CO. This took out 43 radio circuits in my town and our neighboring town served by our CO. Guess what? No OTA setup and knockdown. No communication.

Matt,
They got exactly what they deserved. Although it does not bode well for the citizenry needing municipal emergency response, this proved the point you made.
Management is often clueless on the real nuts and bolts, looking at the dollar signs only. Like my old saying, a masters degree does nor necessarily mean that one has any common sense.
Dave

Never ceases to amaze me Dave!

They are in the process of putting SAM cards in the ambulance quantars for OTA setup and knockdown but it isn't done. But the PD quantars and all their radios are "Astro Only". I don't know how they plan on sending signalling OTA from the console since you can't send DTMF, MDC, or QC-II over astro.

No lawn mower should ever be designed except by a guy who once cut grass for a living.

RKG wrote:No lawn mower should ever be designed except by a guy who once cut grass for a living.

I think even cutting grass would be a stretch for these people.

NMFire10,

Maybe when you get a working sam/quant codeplug for dtmf se-up / knock down you can send me a copy. I still can't get this crap working.

FMROB,

There is one issue that could be responsible for your problems getting SAM to work. Even if what you are trying to accomplish is repeater setup and knockdown or any other SAM function, you must have at least one channel in your Quantar codeplug configured with analog access set to "MDC/TONE"

You don't have to ever use that channel but it must be there so that when the Quantar boots up it properly initializes itself to use the SAM programming.

In other words, if that isn't there you can put in totally perfect SAM and Quantar wildcard programming and it simply will do nothing!

I'll keep that in mind to for when I hear that they can't figure out why it won't work.

I do feel bad for the bosses at the PD. They don't know the ins and outs of these things and rely on their vendor to know their stuff and do it right. Unfortunately, this vendor does nothing but screw it up and lie.

Nmfire,

The process your describing is not making a whole lot of sense. You asked in your last post you copied to the beginning on how In cabinet repeat works. When programmed properly, the ICR function will takeover after the programmed delay and will not need any exterior interaction to make it work properly.

From the sound of your aggravation and the lack of knowledge from your local radio shop, this is what you need to use unless you can allocate the money to install a few small upgrades for the quantars.

And if this is the same status quo for the equipment as was in the picture you posted some time back showing an outside cabinet with either a Spectratac receiver or comparator mounted cockeyed on a telephone pole then I can already imagine how the same shop is not meeting your needs with your current situation.

I use the ICR function on 6 quantar's I keep working properly for three fire departments and one police department / sheriff's office. But this is standard for me whenever I am involved with making sure a voting system is working properly.

There have been quite a few failure in the FDDA lines between the DIU and the site leaving them down. Where the thinking came in is when the county upgrade was installed we mounted XTL2500 mobiles with remote mounted heads (1) mobile and (3) heads at all of the ops positions and now dispatch changes the channel on the mobile and the console will work from the mobile.

With 5 failures since cutover they are not down but the few seconds it takes to change channels and select the alternate radio resource.

The customer is now setting aside funding from microwave.

Just some thoughts.

CoM

Yes, this is the famed system with the receiver held closed with a stick and several animals living in it. So yea, this is all not a surprise

When I say "in-cabinet repeat" now, I am not refering to the fallback. I mean just normal in-cabinet repeat. They can't use ICFBR because they have a main and backup repeater.

Oh Okay,

Yes, the in cabinet repeat can be set up in your main Quantar so that within 200 ms with no F/T no Tx and will revert to the repeat mode. There are drawbacks as one you have mentioned which is you cannot have two stations programmed for this feature on the same frequency, and there will still be the 200 ms of delay in the audio so make your users aware as I do wil a longer hang time on the ICR then on the normal operation so people know to leave a pause in their audio.

Since this does not sound like a station failure then you should not need to use the backup, but if you were looking to remotely control the backplane to switch between functions of main and backup or the like then I have had good luck with Intuitive circuits DTMF-8 relay controller. $120.00 and can easily be wired to just about any audio to give you relay closures with a password to boot.

CoM