Radioshop issue

[kj4jaq]

Greetings everyone,

Unsure if this is correct place for this question/post. As a system admin of a 100% different radio system in a totally different industry, I figured I would post this here.

In my 20+ years of radio experience I personally have never experienced a "bad" radio shop or vendor. Most are friendly and easy to work with (as long as you have $$ and pay your bill.) That said, associate/coworker at one of my facilities is a LT at the local PD and lead investigator as the Parish coroner on his days off from our regular job. PD and Coroner's office are underfunded for radios (amongst other things.) He has authorization letters from both Chief of Police as well as Coroner for BYOD for two-way radio.

Neighboring parish (that is normally programmed into his local PD's radios; including his previous BYOD EFJ portable) is done by company A.
Parish that PD is in is programmed by company B.

Company B programmed his BYOD without issues as he provided authorization letter, proof of position/work title, badge, and money accordingly.

Company A refuses to program the adjacent parish radio system into the radio as it 1. wasn't a radio purchased from him/his company and 2. told "you bought junk on eBay and it isn't worth my time to program it, so I am not programming something off the street." He wasn't requesting free programming and was expecting the typical $100 programming fee as the norm for LEO/FD radio shops in the area. The radio he brought in for programming is the same as what other users of the same system have. Company A also doesn't have any radios for sale (including APX units) to satisfy resolving his comments of not purchasing from him. There are no other radio shops in the area that can program the adjacent parish's radio system due to them being the sole holder to the system encryption key.

----------------
Now, from my point of view as a system admin of non-public safety commercial encrypted trunked radio system:

If I have someone at work requesting to get on our encryption protected radio system and has appropriate reasons, authorization(s), and equipment, I don't bat an eye. We keep a log of radio IDs and the radio owner (if privately owned) or who the company provided radio was assigned to (if not privately owned). If I see emails from HR saying someone is released, their radio's access into our system is instantly removed. If I see a radio (regardless of who owns it) causing issues on our system, it gets killed and removed from the system prior to investigating why it was causing issues. That said, I am not the only authorized person within my company with access to the encryption key or radmin system as is not the case with "company A" above. The programming of radios into/onto our system has a standard operating procedure so it isn't a personal choice of yes or no.
----------------

As radio system administrators or end users, how would you recommend going about resolving the issue with this less than ideal radio shop? I have no dogs in the hunt as it isn't my radio, system, or request to have programming done. One would think Motorola would have alternative means of programming for public service (LEO/FD) in the event that you get the "bad apple" in the bunch of shops.

Thanks.
-Reactorpwr

 

[mmckenna]

Company A sounds like it's playing games.
One of the issues with having a trunked radio system, and then turning over control to a shop, is that it now pretty much becomes their radio system and they can rip you off however they feel like it. If the agency doesn't have a radio admin person who's paying attention, then that's part of the problem.

On the other hand, "Junk from e-Bay" is an issue. Went through this back when we still had a Motorola system. People would buy radios off e-Bay and want me to put them on the system. There were often issues with flashcodes being wrong, having to write all new programming files for a different model radio, plus the chances that the things needed to be aligned, but the owner never wanted to pay for it. They just wanted their cheap E-Bay special to work.

Failure #1 I see is the agency letting a for-profit shop basically have complete control over the radio system. Some small agencies have to do that due to not having sufficient staff, but if they have enough money for their own trunked system, but no one on staff that administers it, then they sort of did this to themselves. They can whine about low budgets all they want, but when they chose a trunked system, they chose their fate. Gotta own up to that.

Failure #2 is letting people bring in random radios and put them on the systems. Said agency not having control over their radio system, but letting people add their own radios is an issue. If the FCC license is in the name of the agency, then the FCC is abundantly clear on the matter. Any radios added to the radio system become the responsibility of the licensee. Doesn't matter who paid for them, or what the Chief says. Doesn't matter if it's a volunteer fire department, they have a low budget, "they've always done it that way", or whatever, the FCC rules are clear. Agencies that assume that the rules do not apply to them are a big issue.

But people are going to do whatever they want. They are going to run their radio systems however they feel like it, FCC rules be damned. Radio shops will take the opportunity to extort users. I'm sure they'll be happy to sell the officer a brand new shiny APX-8000 with every single accessory known to man, and then put a read/write password on the radio codeplug.

 

[kj4jaq]

I could understand the "junk" comment made if it was indeed junk or not appropriately equipped for the system. The model and flash of the unit he delivered for programming is identical to those already on the system. I think it was more along the lines of he didn't want to have to work and/or indeed wanted to try and sell the fully loaded APX8000 to someone paying OOP.

Programming a system into a known working model/previously programmed type radio isnt rocket science. In fact, if I personally owned the system I am an admin of, approved radio programming and alignments would be the bread and butter of my business. A lot of smaller transactions and trivial work vs the random purchases of a larger value gear (but that is just my opinion.)

Thanks for the input!

 

[mmckenna]

Other issue I had, and why I'll never let an outside shop have access to our system keys:

When it was time to reband our SmartNet system, we had to inventory all the radios. Started discovering that there were a LOT of radios on the system with exactly the same radio ID. At one point my predecessor had given one of the local shops a copy of our system key and a couple of radio ID's for a specific project. Said radio shop started programming tons of radios with the same ID's and selling them to our end users and not telling us. Since we billed our end users, we were missing out on a lot of income.

Shop didn't care, they were getting fat/happy off us. When I replaced that POS system, I went with one that had better access controls, and made damn sure that no one ever touched my system keys, or had access to the radio system.

 

[kj4jaq]

When it was time to reband our SmartNet system, we had to inventory all the radios. Started discovering that there were a LOT of radios on the system with exactly the same radio ID. At one point my predecessor had given one of the local shops a copy of our system key and a couple of radio ID's for a specific project. Said radio shop started programming tons of radios with the same ID's and selling them to our end users and not telling us. Since we billed our end users, we were missing out on a lot of income.

Ouch

 

[mmckenna]

I could understand the "junk" comment made if it was indeed junk or not appropriately equipped for the system. The model and flash of the unit he delivered for programming is identical to those already on the system. I think it was more along the lines of he didn't want to have to work and/or indeed wanted to try and sell the fully loaded APX8000 to someone paying OOP.

I think that's the problem. Shop doesn't want to do the work when they know they have the opportunity of selling a new radio to someone. It's all about profit. Chief from the agency may need to have a talk with Company A and remind them who owns the system. But seriously, most cops are not radio guys, and most radio guys are not cops. Assuming that the chief knows which end of the radio to talk into might be a mistake in some cases. Some don't know anything about the radios they are using.

Programming a system into a known working model/previously programmed type radio isnt rocket science. In fact, if I personally owned the system I am an admin of, approved radio programming and alignments would be the bread and butter of my business. A lot of smaller transactions and trivial work vs the random purchases of a larger value gear (but that is just my opinion.)

Yeah, sort of. They'd need to modify the trunked system codeplugs to include the other agencies system. That takes some time, testing and effort. They may not want to do it for whatever their normal programming rate is. Depending on the size/type of the system that could take a while to do.
I always hated it when someone brought me a radio and wanted all sorts of special programming done. Some of those guys were never happy with the outcome and never wanted to pay for the real amount of time it took to do the work. There was always one that wanted the channels in a different order, different minimum volume settings, didn't like the frequency of the warning beep, didn't like the time settings on the scan, etc.