Analog, Digital Audio Comparison

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zerg901

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Analog always seems to be easier for me to understand. Today I was listening to a New Hampshire PD that was using P25. They were giving me 5 bars on the Pro 106 but I could barely understand what they were saying. I could not decipher their callsigns for the life of me. I knew they were running someones license plate info, but that was about all I could figure out.
 

bosox106

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Analog always seems to be easier for me to understand. Today I was listening to a New Hampshire PD that was using P25. They were giving me 5 bars on the Pro 106 but I could barely understand what they were saying. I could not decipher their callsigns for the life of me. I knew they were running someones license plate info, but that was about all I could figure out.

Which dept. in NH were you listening to?
 

N9NRA

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Personally i find digital audio more pleasing to listen to, provided i`m hearing a reasonably clean signal. Yes, you do have to sometimes turn up the volume a tad to hear what is being said, but if i have a choice (and i do), i prefer listening to digital over analog. N9NRA
 

Nap

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It may be just me, but I understood the analog traffic better.

Same here.

What exactly were they comparing anyway. I can see "40 Watts mobile" vs. "3 Watts portable". No mention of "distance to base/tower" for each case or use of vehicular repeater with the portables or anything meaningful.
 

tampabaynews

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I listened to both recordings again in their entirety and I think both clips have points of crystal clear traffic, and some not so clear. To me, dispatch seemed to be the hardest to understand on both recordings for whatever reason.
I've heard my share of good and bad VHF analog and 800mhz digital systems. I guess it's all about what equipment they're using.
 

W8RMH

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I don't know why scanning is all of a sudden an officer-safety issue. I worked in law enforcement for over 21 years and never heard of someone using a scanner resulting in an officer being injured. There was more "good" arising out of it by people observing situations and reporting them to the proper authorities. I only new of a half dozen or so times someone was arrested in possession of a scanner, and after looking at the scanner, 1 out of the 12 scanners were actually operative, and this suspect was arrested in the act of a burglary and never heard us being dispatched or marking on the scene. I think this is just a ploy to sell these new systems which claim to be secure.
 

krokus

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Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.973 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

The digital clarity also depends on the signalling rate. There is a huge difference between 2400 bps and 9600 bps, as most people that have used US government secure telephones can tell you.
 

W2PMX

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I don't hear any difference in "understandability" between the two clips - but that's after more than 50 years of pulling out signals that are below the noise, and the fact that the digital clip never "went digital" or fell off the cliff.

As far as officer safety, what used to happen when the signal was too weak for the dispatcher to understand? Or when another officer stepped on a critical word (which doesn't happen in modern systems)?

This reminds me of the AM/FM controversy, and why aircraft comms are still AM (no capture effect).
 
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