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The past couple days it seems that the Seattle Fire dispatchers have digital radios that are patched to the analog system. I can't confirm for police as I don't listen to them but, is Seattle moving to a digital radio system? or Do they have plans to in the near future?

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I'm sure it will happen sometime down the road. Keep in mind they probably want to get the taxpayers moneys worth out of the radios they already have.


Nope.



You're welcome.

Just out of curiosity, what are you hearing that makes you feel they are using digital radios?

Just because SFD has XTS5000 that can do Astro doesn't mean that they are doing digital. Flashing P25 into a Motorola radio is over a $1,000 option. A lot of agencies have radios that can or has the capability of upgrading to P25 as part of a requirement to get grant money for radios. SERS can do digital but it is all encrypted and only for certain groups (SOS, SWAT, ect...) Also a radio may sound digital but isn’t due to the DSP inside the radio (motorola).

I was just noticing this the other day as well- and was about to post a thread about it. Several of the dispatchers on many different TGs are definitely seeing some sort of low-quality digital compression between the console and repeater. It's really apparent on SFD dispatch (alert tones)

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I've heard the same compression issues on other dispatch centers: sounds like they're on a lousy cell phone connection. Must be the latest "upgrade".

Perhaps Sean could chime in on what the deal is. Sounds like a typical ROIP solution to me.

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If there was something he could say, you'd see his response by now.

Has any Moneyrolla system out there deployed ROIP?

I'm listening to Kirkland PD right now and the dispatcher is absolutely going into the system in digital. So it seems the migration has started but they have a lot of analog subscriber units and it'll take time to finish the cut-over They may be running mixed mode for a long while yet.

Regular R/VoIP still sounds better than the P25 IMBE vocoder, or even the AMBE vocoder. What I hear right now sounds exactly like P25.

Welcome to digital, where even the best spoken English always sounds like mumbling.

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If it sounds like mumbling then someone has not made the adjustments yet...

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Ever since the upgrade to the king county system the dispatchers are definately having some digital translation, so is the locution from the sounds of it. Just a bit harder to understand...

Sean posted this:


Seems like the dispatch consoles are outputting IMBE over the wireline to a SmartX Site converter. From there, it's being decoded and sent as analog audio over the repeater. Just a guess though.

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This should explain the setup: http://mediacenter.motorola.com/imagelibrary/downloadmedia.ashx?MediaDetailsId=643

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So if King County is going digital will any of the Uniden Digital scanners work like the BCD396XT.

Yes and no:

The older BC250d will only work with 3600baud Astro systems and 800mhz systems that haven't been rebanded.

Anything newer (such as the 396XT) WILL work.

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