APRS on (volunteer) fire trucks?

[902]

Originally Posted by LtDoc

All I can say is that Motorola better hang on to the salesman who talked the locals into a "Moto-Trouble" system. The other side of that is that if I ever am in the market, and I see him on my porch, I'm gonna shoot that @#$ guy/gal/whatever!
I'm sure there has to be a good "Moto-Trouble" system somewhere, but I also think they are few and far between from what I've seen/read/heard of.
YMMV
- 'Doc

The biggest issue is channel occupancy. When someone tosses one of those things on the air, especially on VHF, it completely occupies the frequency. Sometimes that's on nearly 100%. What other issues are you seeing with them? They are getting very common as people want to go digital, but they don't want to spend the money on P25.

[902]

BTW, those aren't APRS. Unfortunately, the system seems to repeat the transmissions and there are synchronization bursts, setup times, hang times, and so forth occupying the channel. Add to that a moderate-sized fleet with posits and you get tons of on-air time.

[LtDoc]

'MotoTRBO' is 'P25' just with a few 'extras' that Motorola added. Unfortunately, those 'extras' are typically more trouble than they are worth really. Before the 'encryption' was turned on the locals did -fair- with the MotoTRBO system. Of course, that was after more than a week of re-tuning each radio in each vehicle, after the original radio was installed. I figure that was because of the lack of knowledge and ability of the company handling the install and set up. And of course, Motorola gets a piece of the blame for producing such a crappy system to start with. You won't hear them complaining about the 'new' radio system, they DO want to keep their jobs. (That's not a joke by the way.) The one that made the most 'noise' about the new system was told to shut his mouth, and he did. You gotta know the town to understand that sort of thing.
The one local department is the only one in this area. They are NOT compatible with other departments in this area. Wonder why they ever decided to do it? 'Homeland' even warned them about that, they didn't listen.
- 'Doc

[kayn1n32008]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

MotoTRBO is NOT in any way P25 with 'a few extra that Motorola added' why would to say something that is completely false like that?

P(Project)25 is a protocol written by APCO in North America, MotoTRBO is based on DMR from Europe.

[Jay911]

Originally Posted by kayn1n32008

MotoTRBO is NOT in any way P25 with 'a few extra that Motorola added' why would to say something that is completely false like that?

This has been derailed WAY the hell off APRS in fire trucks, but I know at least two municipalities in your and my area that seem to have been led to believe exactly that.. at least one of them told me that they were told the upgrade path from TRBO to AFRRCS was 'seamless'.

[kayn1n32008]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Originally Posted by Jay911

This has been derailed WAY the hell off APRS in fire trucks, but I know at least two municipalities in your and my area that seem to have been led to believe exactly that.. at least one of them told me that they were told the upgrade path from TRBO to AFRRCS was 'seamless'.

*facepalm*

Oh god. Gotta love the sales tactics. RM is lucky that they have a comms guy that knows what is going on. Seamless except for haveing to buy all new radios... Sad that the taxpayers get taken for a hard ride that way

[LtDoc]

You're right, derailed, off-topic, and unnecessary. Consider me repentant.
- 'Doc