RCS stats

Industry Agrees with FCC Ruling on Analog FM on Interop Channels

I found this statement by Morton interesting.

Leifer said eschewing digital and P25 in general would cause public safety to lose features such as directed unit-to-unit call, call check and call alert and others. “These features, which would be useful in a multiagency interoperability environment, would not be available using analog FM,” Leifer said.
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Don - can you track stats on these features?

My experience is that most users don't know these features exist. I'm guessing Morton is too young to know about MDC1200 signalling which had similar features in the analog days. I can't imagine how one unit would have the radio ID of another unit in a different agency.

I've only been on 3 federal disaster deployments, maybe he has more direct experience with multi agency use.

Direct radio to radio is usually discouraged because it mean most users are not getting info they may need.
My ICS instructor told me you never run an incident on a cell phone.

Morty is an experienced Professional Engineer with at least a decade more experience than I have. Knowing how writers and editors operate, I suspect that the quote you cite was in reference to operating on a trunked system, not conventional interoperability channels. Take a look at the quote in the 'graf prior to the one you quoted:

“Being an older and widely used technology, it (analog) is more universally available and thus most suitable for the interoperable channels at this time,” Leifer said. “The many incompatible digital modes that are in use these days would be problematic for interoperability.”

The NPSTC position came from many user's experiences with large multi-agency emergency events, at locations all over the country. A user running a digital mode on a conventional channel will often not even be aware there is an analog user operating along side (of course, the analog user only hears digital noise, and decides 'this isn't working').

To answer your question about our ability to capture stats, yes, we could track most of the features he listed, if we allowed them. [We don't because features like Private Call take up a channel resource in each impacted cell for each conversation.]

San Diego County interop is, although not perfect, 100x better than the Los Angeles area. back in the early 2000's, when radios started shipping with 255 channels, LAPD and other agencies had in theri radios the dispatch channels for other agencies, but in all of my years working in los Angeles, not once did I hear them ever come up on another agencies channel. The closest thing to interagency "patches" were the various helicopters communicating with each other on specific AM air band channels. And that was in a county where 90% of the comms were conventional T band UHF.

Paul