Hi,
Why are the railroads switching to NXDN? What's wrong with tried and true analog technology? Is NXDN proprietary? Why as Americans and taxpayers allowing are public servants to use encryption? What are they hiding?
Mike
Well, for one, railroads are for the most part private enterprises that have no obligation to provide scanner listeners entertainment. They are in the business (and business is the operative word) of providing transportation for people and property. If they wanted to encrypt their communications they are perfectly within their rights to do so. They are not "Public Servants" in the same sense that police and fire are, they are for the most part Common Carriers. Big difference.
NXDN provides a way for them to fulfill a requirement to use a smaller slice of the spectrum. While analog can work fine on the current 12.5 Khz channels it cannot on the future 6.25 mandate. Thus digital was chosen, and the various railroad companies agreed to use NXDN.
NXDN is proprietary, just as P25 and TRBO are. The right to use it must be purchased by the manufacturers. Kenwood, Icom and others have done so for NXDN and are producing radios with it. The railroads will be switching over to it eventually according to current plans. When they start actually using it in a major way is anyone's guess.
So far there have been no overt plans to use encryption that I am aware of by the railroad companies, but if they do there is nothing we can do to prevent it.
While a NXDN scanner is not yet available, I wouldn't be surprised if one is made available at some time in the future, especially if railroads switch over to NXDN in an unencrypted mode. Of course the scanner manufacturers will need to purchase the codecs from their owners, just as they do now for P25.
The difference between the 3 common digital protocols is that P25 is for sale to any manufacturer that wants to pony up the money to buy the rights. NXDN and TRBO are only for sale to those that the owners want to sell it to. If Uniden wants to build a scanner capable of NXDN, TRBO or both they can only do so if the owners of the tech allows them, no matter how much money they throw at them.