Batboard

Anybody by chance have any documentation on this device? TIA

I know this is an old post, but if your looking for a fine Interop Gateway, try looking at a company called Sytech Corp that is located in Alexandria, VA.

Their gateways have some features that to my knowledge no other company has. Their gateway can use the Internet to be able to control the gateway remotely. One of the features that I have used is to control a Motorola base station to change it to a different frequency.

Another feature is that it can connect between 2 different trunking systems and change the talk group selection of each radio remotely. One system might be a Motorola P25 and the second one might be a different vendor trunking system. You would have to check with Sytech to see what they can currently be able to do.

They have a 2 radio version so you could connect between a trunking radio and a conventional radio. Like some fire departments might have had a low band, VHF repeater base station or even a UHF repeater base station system at their fire station. This 2 channel gateway could link them together.

Here in southern Louisiana, many of the police and fire departments migrated to the state P25 system I told those that I had contact with to maintain their old radio system. The reason was that if we had a major storm hit the area, the state trunking system would be overloaded by traffic from the other users that switched to the 700 trunking system and got rid of their original radios.

The state towers did not have enough radios at the tower sites to keep up with the traffic trying to use the 700 trunking system during the major part of the storm and for a couple of days after. So being able to revert back to their original radio system allowed the different agencies to have radio capability. Plus the dispatch centers kept the original radios to be able to talk and dispatch calls during the heavy traffic during and right after the storm.

If your presented with migrating to a trunking system, look at what the radio traffic could be during an emergency. Ask how many radios are at the tower sites. Even in trying to plan for heavy traffic loads on the trunking system, there is a cost involved in trying to allow for heavy traffic times.

One of the problems here in Saint Tammany Parish is the number of normal users. Plus this is a bedroom area. So we have many people working in New Orleans. Like the police, EMS, Fire and Public works. If just one employee brings their portable radio home from each department, they just sucked up a talk group for their radio being on at home.

Then there is the state police for the area, the state DPW, the state jail in the parish, plus each of the police department in the Parish. Don't forget each of the different fire departments in the Parish. It doesn't take a 5th grade student to figure out that your probably going to find out that the 8 voice channels is way too short of what is needed to keep the radio traffic flowing smoothly.

This is why most of the agencies are still maintaining their original radio systems.

Just keep this in mind when considering going to a trunking system. You might just need your old radio system as backup during a weather emergency. Here in southern Louisiana, we don't have to normally worry about snow storms. But we get hurricanes and tornadoes. Don't forget the heavy rains with the flooding they cause.

Jim