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Kenwood: UID displayed with no voice

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69CJ

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I oversee a 20 channel, 4 tower site system using KW portables, mobiles, and repeaters. For the last few year, we have suffered with a problem where a UID will display but no voice will come through or alias will display. I understand UID is handled by the control rptr and voice is handled by the assigned traffic channel. Anyone else have this problem? I have a ton more info but trying to keep it short initially.
 

mmckenna

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I've got a single site 5 channel system. Haven't noticed this issue.

I did have issues when I put the system in originally with one of the older firmware versions. When scanning, the radio wouldn't always pass the audio. Updating the firmware fixed it.

As for no audio…
You are not running encryption, right?
 

k4ktr

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If you have not updated the firmware on the units and the system you need to do this. also the portables that are doing it need to be checked for alignment if it is a 6.25 system radios being off frequency just a little bit can cause big issue
 

69CJ

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my portables and mobiles are all on version 5.11 of the firmware. We have tried 4.75, 4.77, 4.79 and 5.00 without solving the issues. All of the repeaters are running 4.66 but were on 4.64. KW says in a conference call updating the firmware on the repeaters to a higher version won't help as the newer firmware addresses the 5000 series repeaters only. We are not running any type of encryption.

I will begin to check alignment issues. I assume you are speaking about alignment on the xmit side. What hardware do you recommend for this?

Thanks for the replies.
 

domes

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I would be curious to know if this problem is mostly rcving portable TX. If it is, your problem may not actually be a problem but you are dealing with plain old portable talk back issues. In that case, your CC TX ERP may be too high.
I don't know what your site antenna configuration or repeater power out you use. Consider the extreme case of using a 100 watt repeater on a single antenna with duplexer. Ain't no way a 5 watt portable, analog or any digital, can talk back as far as it can hear the 100 watt rptr. You can put all your rcvrs on 1 top mounted, hi gain antenna with filtering and pre-amps to improve performance, but ideal antenna systems are not always practical in the real world. Your symptoms indicate you can talk into the CC but not into the TC. Keep in mind that the data exchanged on the CC is more tolerant of high BER and low signal level than what is required to decode the voice data stream.
Having gangbuster repeater TX where portables can hear traffic out in the boon docks or in buildings eventhough they can't talk back might be OK for single site service but that is not what you want for multi-site. Subscriber units monitor the CC until the BER or signal level drops below a certain level, then they will look for a better site. It can be frustrating when your radio stays locked onto a site that you can't talk back to when you've driven well into the next site. The "FAILED" indication means that you can't even talk back to the CC.
Program some portables that you can disable the auto-roam and manually lock the radios on each site and test your talk back range. Normally a radio won't roam until the signal goes down to 1 bar. Find some locations where the radio is at a steady 1 bar and test your talk back. You can diddle with the roam threshold levels of the portable but we found that the better solution is to crank the CC power down in 3dB steps or half the power and field test the radios again.
I confess that we used to run high ERP channels with 100 watts because that is what we are licensed for and we would roll the CC over every night... until we added a bunch of portables that had the same complaint that you described. We now lock control on ch 1 and field tested each site for portable talk back balance. CC Settings vary from 20 to 60 watts. The lower power does not seam to effect the range of mobiles but it did cure our poor & no talkback complaints with portables, and improved our roaming function in overlap areas. We run our TC's at 90 watts because we can and it assures a good voice data path to the units.
 

69CJ

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domes,
Thanks for the advice. I will begin to test what you have indicated. At this point, I am out of viable options.
Our sites are 1&2 with TX/RX antenna being opposing at 150' on water tower, These sites were the original sites and the symptoms at that time were not widely reported. Site 3 has RX at 300 and 2-TX at 280 and 260. Site 4 is RX at 320 and 2-TX at 300 and 260. All the sites, with the exception of Site 2 have DB-224s, Site 2 has a pair of 222s. We run close to 100W on all sites/all repeaters. For the last few months all sites have used repeater 5 without rollover. I am about to move all of them to repeater 1. I was thinking for awhile we have to conventional/possibly analog interference on one or all sites but have yet to find a good way to test for it. I am not even sure if an outside source can affect my system in the manner I have described.
 

69CJ

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Sites 1 and 2 are on top of a pancake-style water tower. We have looked for alternatives to this location but have yet to find one. Without creating shadows by mounting this on the sides we just have to continue to filter out the transmit freqs. When this system was just those two sites, i've been told the UID only issue didn't occur. Upgrading firmware, adding sites and network complexity has introduced much of what people complain about. I appreciate the responses. I am looking at reducing CC power as suggested earlier as another step I need to try.
 

domes

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Jun 18, 2013
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I don't like your antenna set ups either. 20 ft TX to RX vertical separation with VHF is not enough either. Its easy to mess up programming when you add repeaters & sites so that may be another issue to look at.

Do you have Monitoring software? You can look at the call history in the Communication Log and check for error codes at each site and that will help you narrow down which repeaters and/or sites are having problems.
 

69CJ

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We just have the 149 software that KW provides. It doesn't provide any real insight. The Comm Log within the system manager is better but still doesn't seem to log when we have the UID issue. Which is to say I see/hear the issue and check the log and there isn't any entry during that period of time. We do get occasional busies and network drops but they occur at a much lesser rate that does the issue being discussed. I do wish we could get off of the W/Ts. Not only is the separation an issue but just getting in the grounds is cumbersome do to key control.
 
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