DSDPlus Asterisk In P25 Aliases

[KickinCans]

With the P25 system I am monitoring with DSD+, some of the aliases have an asterisk appended to them. It seems to be only fire department mobiles that have this (WTWR-22*, KP-12*). I see other fire aliases coming in like ELP-411 which I believe are portables (no asterisks), and console radios do not alias with an asterisk (K DSP 3). No other agency radio has asterisks regardless of use.
Any guesses on what the asterisks represent? Is this a DSD+ think, or system programming thing exclusive to this system? I have not manually entered any radio information and have relied on DSD+ auto alias population. (AI claims the asterisk means DSD+ wrote over previously entered information with with server alias info).

 

[u2brent]

An asterisk or anything inside the quotes in the radio file "alias" is being sent OTA from the P25 system.
In the event log they appear inside brackets [alias]
P25 radios are handled differently in the radio file.
The first field is user defined, The second is written by DSD OTA followed by an error correction code created by DSD these last two fields are not edited by the user.

P25,       92466.00A, 5463,       1154603,    50,  Normal,      67,  2026/05/11  7:31,  "CC COM666 Port COM666P", "COM666P",        E5A617BC

In the above case a user defined alias is not edited by DSD if there is one.

An asterisk in front of the quotes *"alias" is used on DMR & NXDN only to allow an OTA to be captured, In this case anything previously written inside "alias" will be overwritten by the OTA, appears in the event log as [alias] .

NEXEDGE48, 50,        1401,       4211,       50,  Normal,     212,  2021/08/28 13:05,  *"Blenders Base"

In this case DSD will overwrite anything in the field with the newly aquired OTA.
If you do not want an alias to be erased or overwritten you remove the asterisk in front. But then you won't capture any updates or changes to that radio in the future.

In your specific case the system admins may simply have chosen * to denote a mobile unit.
I tend to ramble on, I hope some of that makes some sense

 

[gary123]

For Waterloo Region the * is used to indicate the second pumper or rescue at that location. Many Fire services use a standardized numbering format. IE xxxx1 = pumper, xxxx2 = rescue, xxxx3 = tanker etc. So when there are two pumpers instead of using xxxx1A the system admin has named it xxxx1*

As u2brent said the * is a valid character and is not an error in the alias decoding.

 

[KickinCans]

Thank you both for your explanations. It's taking me a bit to figure it out, but it's helpful.
Gary123, not sure I understand about multiple, say pumpers at "that location" (referring to a station?), being given the same alias differentiating only with the asterisk.
In my example, I gave KP-12. There is only one Pump 12 at Stn 2. Any 2nd pumpers for example at another station have their own IDs, like KP-18 and KP-19. I'm not sure what stations they work out of, but they would be second pumpers at that particular station.

I think I have figured out the nomenclature of the radio IDs (not proven, just speculation). This kinda fits for fire, but the speculation fades when trying to relate to the other agencies. (eg stations/base in particular - unique to the system, or to the service, or maybe nothing to do with such, and this theory only provides for 2 digit radio numbers)

Radio ID = aabccdd (eg 1121601 CA-36)
where aa = Service (11 = Cambridge Fire),
b = mobile/portable (0 = Console 1 = portable, 2 = mobile),
cc = Station/Base (16 = Station 16) and,
dd = radio number (01)
As proof to my speculative theory, Cambridge doesn't have a station 16 (Kitchener does), but has a station 36. So maybe of cc, c represent one thing, and the second c something additional. Or maybe the second c is actually part of the dd to allow 3 digits for radio. Just some mental excercise.