ve3nsv said:
I was referring to the Roam Wait Timer - this is usually set to double the value of the Idler Timer. If I remember correctly the default in the PPCPS is 8 seconds and it would take the radio close to a minute to sample all the site at that speed.
I checked a bunch of old codeplugs - it looks like we were using 3 to 5 seconds for Roaming Wait Time. The PPCPS default value was 5 seconds (IIRC it was 8 seconds in the early days)
One issue we ran in to was the fact that busy (handling an active voice comm) home channels don't send forced idle OSW's at anywhere near 1 Hz; for the first year or so the PassPort firmware in the 1250LS+ and 1550LS+ radios used the Roaming Wait Time value even after the radios had stopped roaming and were registered at a site. A short Roaming Wait Time combined with a busy home channel triggered frequent roaming, even though the RSSI was through the roof.
So we could have fast roaming, but no control over when it happened, or we could have slow roaming. Yippee.
Motorola eventually fixed that bug. Unfortunately, there were other issues; radios that were left powered on for a few days (e.g. dispatch radios and those in heavily used vehicles) would improperly store neighbour lists and write past the buffer space that was set aside for them. This caused the radios to go nuts and transmit unmodulated carriers every few seconds on their home channel's input frequency whenever
any PassPort group was using that repeater. Since dispatch radios typically had a nice rooftop Yagi pointing back to the site, they easily wiped out the legitimate comms.
Radios in that state wouldn't respond to any user inputs (PTT, etc.), but would recover if they were power cycled. Of course, customers didn't know this and would insist on a service call to replace the radio (and its power supply and its mic and anything else they thought might be the problem)
Every other customer on the system had to repeat many of their transmissions as the sick radios kept wiping out call details (like addresses and phone numbers)
And what's with the 1 Hz minimum pulse rate? Why not just keep home channels and collect channels permanently keyed and continuously transmitting idle OSWs when they have no voice traffic to deal with? That would let you use Roaming Wait Times of 1 second or less. I tell ya, between them, Trident and Motorola did a hell of a job of making the system a PITA for our customers. Slow roaming, uncommanded roaming, radios locking up and dead keying over other users, hetrodyning when two users keyed up simultaneously (just like LTR), poor roaming options (see all those choices on the RSSI page? we didn't have those)
No wonder Telus stole so many customers.
