Apco 3600 - 9600 Compatibility

[crandy2]

Does anyone know if there are any problems with apco 25 3600 and apco 25 9600 communicating?

I have a situation where the Birmingham Ala city pd has already gone 3600, and the surrounding county has announced that they will be converting to apco25 as well in about a year, but no one seems to know whether it will be 3600 or 9600.

I want to get a radio for christmas, and am torn between the bc250d and the bc296d. I know that the 296 would do both, but also can get the 250d for about $200 less.

Does anyone have an educated guess about interoperability between 3600 and 9600? I would assume that the county would go with 3600 if interoperability was a problem.

 

[FPO703]

I want to get a radio for christmas, and am torn between the bc250d and the bc296d. I know that the 296 would do both, but also can get the 250d for about $200 less.

Yeah, if you get just the BC250 without the APCO-25 Card

 

[SCPD]

If they have Motorola radios this is how it works. A radio with a Flashcode that supports only 3600 (Smart Net or Smart Zone) will not work on a 9600 system.

A radio that has a Flashcode that supports 9600 (Astro 25 Trunking) will also work on a 3600 system (for backwards compatibility).

A lot of people have said in the past that it wasn't until the XTS 5000 that you could have 3600 and 9600 in the same radio. This is not true. The XTS 3000, when it gets a Flashcode for 9600, also gets a "special" Host/DSP combo that allows it to do both. There are some other features that are lost because of a memory limitation in the radio. The Astro Spectra mobile is the same.

Of course any brand new systems would just have the new radios that already have a Host/DSP combo that supports both.

That's probably way more info than you wanted.........

 

[crandy2]

So it sounds like I need to try and find out what model and flashcode birmingham has.

thanks for the help.

 

[WayneH]

In reality though you're only likely to see XTS-5000s setup for both.

Motorola does a lot of SP stuff but it's not given to everyone. Normally neither the 3000, 2500, etc (except the 5000) will do either one but not both.

-Wayne