Oh, surely that's not it.
I've come to the conclusion that most of the 'stories' and 'negative comments' that are posted on these forums, about MOTOTRBO systems not working correctly and/or being 'terrible', fall into four categories:
1. The stories are made up, just not true. This may actually be information that is repeated from competitors to DMR. It wouldn't be the first time that something like this has happened in the business world.
2. The person making the 'negative' comments about MOTOTRBO has no clue as to whether the system really works well or not, but he/she just doesn't like the fact that they can't easily monitor it anymore.
3. The systems truly aren't working as they -could- work, because the dealer that set them up doesn't understand MOTOTRBO well enough to correctly design a system and get it working properly. MOTOTRBO is not 'plain old two-way radio' like we've all been used to working with and using for the past 50 years. There's a definite learning curve to properly implementing MOTOTRBO systems.
4. The person making the 'negative' comments has listened to a user of the system who is having trouble, but has no idea why (from a technical perspective) and blames their problems on the system itself when the problems may be elsewhere.
A good example of this last category is one of my customers who was complaining of problems. While I think we may have had some problems due to an issue in the version of firmware that was in the mobiles and portables (we flashed the units to the latest version of firmware and that did seem to help), we found one truck with no antenna and the coax 'disconnected' from the antenna mount. Another antenna had been mounted down in the windshield wiper 'well', and the SWR was around 3:1. They had a former employee do some of the installation work, after we had checked everything over (after first installation) and he had no clue as to what he was doing. The coax wasn't even soldered onto the antenna mount (on the one that had fallen apart) because he didn't get anywhere near enough heat on the connections to melt the solder to the mount. And one of the complaints doesn't have anything to do with the system at all - they're dispatched by another company, who's dispatch console system isn't set up properly (for good sounding audio), so it sounds pretty bad on the MOTOTRBO system. If that company's console system was set up properly, then it would sound fine on the MOTOTRBO system. But that console system isn't maintained by us, so we have no control over it.
Simply put, when MOTOTRBO systems are designed properly (and that doesn't mean designing them like we used to design two-way radio systems), and the equipment is programmed and installed properly, and you don't run into a little software bug (it happens with everyone's products nowadays), the MOTOTRBO systems will perform extremely well, much better than any analog systems that I've seen anywhere in 34 years in this industry.
And as fast as DMR is growing, I think it's only a matter of time (and maybe not too much time) before a scanner manufacturer develops and markets a scanner capable of monitoring DMR.
John Rayfield, Jr. CETma
Because he won't be able to listen to it.