InterceptRadio.com Forums

Does anyone know if King County is planning on changing their trunk systems from type 2 Motorola to anything else? If so what? If so when?
Thanks allot!

Daniel

_________________
I love shortwave and scanner monitoring. It is a hobby I have had since boyhood that I recently rediscovered with the purchase of a close out scanner. (BC895xlt) (Icom r-75)

Dan,
As you are not getting getting the detail you want- I'll recap:

In summary, I believe the answer is no immediate 'big' changes like a band change or trunking protocol change appear immediately at hand.

What will the longer term will bring? Who can say- get your crystal ball out.. lots of variables at play.... With $5 gas getting ready to tank the economy and thus deleteriously effecting tax revenues, i would offer that new big ticket items like this are going to be harder to fund for the next couple of years without a bond issue or local option tax both of which require voter consent.

Regardless, DTV is not appear to be a factor at this time for the King Co. system. Just because analog TV goes away does not mean that there is an instant movement toward the overblown altar of 700mhz and/or P25.

Please note that many folks on these boards are "in the know" with regard to such details (and I am NOT one of them) and there has NOT been any info on this board about a paradigm shift of any sort with regard to this system.

What is your basis for urgency of this question? Do you know something?

Are you asking as you might have/want to upgrade your equipment for P25 and/or 700Mhz trunking capability?? If so, I would say there is no indication that is necessary at this time.

If there is a better answer out there, I defer to someone 'in the know'.

2011, 2012 maybe

_________________
I generate Board Warnings

I've been hearing horror stories from around the country about the IMBE vocoder failing to decode/encode. Is this going to derail P25 or just result in a newer revision of it perhaps?

_________________
I taste copper.
Comments, views, opinions - and trails of destruction - are my own.

Phase I sounds better than analog, Phase II leaves something to be desired at this point. There is a huge ongoing effort to make it better. Time will tell

_________________
I generate Board Warnings

Along the same lines, what's up with the 800 rebanding? I had heard that our agency was going to get new mobile radios, and that our portable would be re-flashed.

Is this still going to happen, and if so, when?

Lastly, are you guys talking about the replacement of the current wide-area 800 systems throughout King County? While the system works pretty good, I hope the next system is designed for betting coverage in buildings (like when you're trying to fight a fire in a large building and have to use State Ops 1 instead of the normal trunked TG, because you can't get a signal)

Like I said above, the system works good--most of the time, but sometimes I'd like it to perform a bit better in buildings and reinforced structures. Perhaps I'm being naive about what systmes capabilities are, so feel free to educate me.

Let's see how well the King County TRS works in the next big quake, because in the last one the system was barley useable.

_________________
Realistic Patrolman PRO-48, Uniden BC-800XLT, Radio Shack PRO-2018, Uniden BC-895XLT, Uniden BC-245XLT, RCA RP-6100,
Realistic PRO-2006, Uniden BR330T, Uniden BCT15X

The 28 February 2001 earthquake occurred at 1054. The system traffic for the 15 minute period ending at 1115 was:

For KC/VC- 3000 calls per 15 min.
For SEA- 2500 calls per 15 min.
For EPSCA- 2000 calls per 15 min.

These call volumes were about twice the "normal" traffic up to the event. This call volume continued until about 1430, when it started to decline. Traffic was back to normal levels about 1630 or so.

The system worked well (we had one site go into site trunking and one simulcast remote site go off the air (amputated by the system because of problems) but these did not have a large impact). High priority talkgroups got thru with no more than about 1 second delay, if that. Lower priority talkgroups did not fare nearly as well. But that was the design.

What didn't work well was user discipline. There was way too much un-necessary chit-chat and many users kept changing the talkgroup on their radio in an attempt to bypass any delays. Users also forgot other aspects of their training such as wait for the permit-to-talk tone instead of just re-keying the radio.

Since '01, several capacity increases, redundancy improvements, and upgrades have been performed. Another event that causes high volumes of traffic will still stress the system (just as the phone system is stressed on Mother's Day), but I have no doubt system performance and user experience will be improved.

Wiz

Yeah, I'll echo what Wiz said. End-users of the system (police, fire, public works, etc) really blew it in terms of waiting for their turn to talk. Many forgot (or never knew) that when the system goes into the queue mode, you have to wait until you get the permit-to-talk tone after getting the system busy signal.

Many had never heard that specific "busy" signal from the system, and didn't know what to do. So many users simply re-keyed their radios repeatedly.

Our agency recently received a re-fresher class on the 800 system, and the powerpoint program had audio files of all the system noises, tones, signals, etc. It was good for employees who had limited experience with the radios.