106 vs 2041 on conventional freq - audio delay.

[w2xq]

I have a question on pager alerts and an audio mute. Perhaps a member can help?

We have a conventional 154.2200 MHz for a county-wide fire/EMS dispatch frequency. To alert the appropriate township(s), a two-tone pager alert is sent before the dispatcher calls out the location (no carrier drop between tones and voice).

The analogue 2041 captures the tone and voice immediately. The 106 (manufactured in July 2011) apparently mutes the pager tones; that's OK with me. But what I cannot understand is why the 106 mutes the voice for 2-4 seconds, loosing the start of the voice. On the 106 and 2041 an adjacent county's county-wide fire/EMS conventional 154.4300 MHz that does not use tones, all is well, picking up at the start of the transmission. CTCSS is set for both frequencies.

In the 106 the only programming difference (using Win500) is a flashing red LED on 154.2200, no LED on 154.4300 MHz. Some global settings as suggested in the Utah Radio pdf have been applied. I haven't tweaked individual objects.

The flashing LED is not a problem with the 106 objects. I have perhaps two-dozen objects set with a flashing LED: red for certain fire channels, cyan for air stuff, green for forest fire, violet for one conventional and one talkgroup in my township, yellow for news, etc.

No audio is sandbagged except for this two-tone pager and voice 154.2200 channel. Once the 106 audio starts, the 106 and 2041 are completely in sync.

And it isn't a question of other objects/channels being active when 154.2200 comes up. This occurs even when the 106 is otherwise quiet (e.g., late at night).

The question is would there be any individual object/channel tweaks to fix this minor problem? I'm stumped... thanks in advance.

 

[hpycmpr]

I suspect part of the problem is that it is common for dispatch to tone out a radio without CTCSS and then use CTCSS for the voice portion thereby eliminating the tones to the listener. The radio would still react to the tones and turn on.
Why the delay on the voice I don't know and could be at the dispatch end or on your radio.
Try listening without CTCSS turned on and see what happens.

Steve

 

[buddrousa]

Is the system still wide band or narrow band and how high is the deviation set to on the paging base?
The 106/197 clips real bad if the deivation is set to high on the transmitter anything over 4.5kz peak to peak clips on wide band and anything over 3.0kz on narrow band this I have tested with an IFR service monitor. Also my 785D will skip the tones if data skip is turned on.

 

[w2xq]

Steve and Buddy, thank you for your input.

Buddy, after turning off the -106 CTSS tone I compared both scanners' behavior for a few hours this afternoon. Both stop when active (250 hits in the last 48 hours) the tones and audio pass through with similar audio and quality. Without the CTSS I actually notice a very quick drop of the carrier between tones and voice; your statement of no-tone followed by tone appears to be the issue.

Steve, I have 154.22 programmed into the two scanners, the VX-6 and the car's FT-8800R. I don't have test equipment any longer, but the audio on all four radios does not sounded distorted or clipped. I understand the concept of clipping; in the earlier years of a local 2m repeater, it had the deviation cranked up so far the only solution was to tell the person to back off the microphone some 6-12 inches until a service monitor could be hooked up to the repeater. Some users with "hot" HT mikes can to this day drive the audio to distortion as received on the FT-8800R; IMHO, there are a few HTs on the dealers' shelves that have the manufacture deviation set too high.

I never noticed the drop of the carrier between tones and pager before. The signal strengh is good throughout the county. Not wanting to zero out the global delay for all channels, I just reloaded the -106 scanner with the CTCSS turned back on and turned off the delay on the one (154.22) channel. I can't tell the effect of the change yet because the county TRS system is hyperactive this evening (car stops and and MVA's). But I listen as late as 1 or 2 am, and and police activity usually slows after 11 pm.

Thanks again for the ideas and suggestions. I'll report back around midday tomorrow as to what the results are.

 

[w2xq]

An update to the question and possible solutions above. Playing around with delay settings, so far the most reasonable action seems to be to turn off the delay on the pager/voice channel itself. I put the CTSS back on so I didn't have to listen to the the paging tones (570 hits in <4 days). Mostly it appears to be catching the voice beginning, a few not for reasons I don't understand. But the bottom line is that it catches the voice keyup almost all the time now, much better than before. Thanks to Steve and Buddy for stirring the synopses in my brain.