G5 Missing Alerts on UHF

[chrisb480]

All,

I oversee the issuing and maintenance of pagers at my department. We have been using the G5 for probably two years now, issuing them to just about all our members. Recently, I have been approached about a few issues regarding alerting on UHF. Some I have also experienced myself. Our pagers seem to either alert for the wrong company, alert during the middle of a dispatcher talking, or not alert at all. I personally recently had the pager on "open" when our fire tone went out and the pager did not alert. I firmly believe this is not a reception issue, as we get great reception throughout our county. I understand this is an issue with pagers in general, however, we have invested quite a bit of money into the Unication name and hope for a positive outcome.

I'm sure this forum is filled with experts out there. Feel free to give me some suggestions that I can experiment with in the PPS in order to hopefully correct this issue. If you wish to see the PPS I am programming into these pagers, message me your email, and I will send it your way!

Thanks & stay safe,
Chris

 

[chrisb480]

^ If needed ^

 

[w2lie]

Chris,
Why did you use a "user defined" tone timing table instead of a Motorola or Fast Plectron timing table? I've helped some customers of mine in the past and we've usually been able to fix this type of issue by changing the tables to Motorola timing.

Also, what version of Firmware are you using? Unication released 1.31 a few months back. Have you updated those pagers yet?

 

[chrisb480]

Thanks for replying. Initially, the pagers came in pre programmed using user defined. I have checked out the Motorola table and everything seemed to match up, so I left it as it. Not all pagers are using 1.31 however, mine is and I have issues as well.

 

[mpreece]

I imagine you are referring to analog, 2-tone paging. I have battled this issue on my personal VHF G5, and at various times it exhibits all these behaviors. Sometimes it will go along fine then suddenly fail. This is not on a one frequency system but rather on silent scan or normal scan of 5-6 channels. I have a couple long tones in the mix. Your protocol settings appear reasonable to me.

I have varied channel scan timing, protocol timings, user defined vs Motorola timing, and several other parameters but the missed page/odd alerts continue to eventually occur. This had been consistent since v1.30 (now on v1.31). I did not have the issue on v1.20 and when I switch back to that firmware the problems disappear.

I have conjectured it may be related to the call stacking feature initiated in v1.30, or possibly related to a backlight timing issue (if the backlight goes out before the reset time expires, maybe it quits counting down?) I have never set the backlight to permanently on to rule that out.

I had the weird case where during the channel scan the pager properly stopped and opened on one channel, yet alerted to a page from a different channel while “stopped” on the original one! It almost seemed it was still scanning in the background while playing audio on the stop channel.

I have sent trace logs to unication but not heard if this is a reported problem or if they have any news on the issue. I am retired so the missed pages is more of a nuisance, but I understand the detrimental effect on mission-critical use.

Sorry to hear you have this issue, but relieved at the same time that I am not the only one experiencing this. Good luck and I hope you get it resolved.

 

[chrisb480]

I imagine you are referring to analog, 2-tone paging. I have battled this issue on my personal VHF G5, and at various times it exhibits all these behaviors. Sometimes it will go along fine then suddenly fail. This is not on a one frequency system but rather on silent scan or normal scan of 5-6 channels. I have a couple long tones in the mix. Your protocol settings appear reasonable to me.

I have varied channel scan timing, protocol timings, user defined vs Motorola timing, and several other parameters but the missed page/odd alerts continue to eventually occur. This had been consistent since v1.30 (now on v1.31). I did not have the issue on v1.20 and when I switch back to that firmware the problems disappear.

I have conjectured it may be related to the call stacking feature initiated in v1.30, or possibly related to a backlight timing issue (if the backlight goes out before the reset time expires, maybe it quits counting down?) I have never set the backlight to permanently on to rule that out.

I had the weird case where during the channel scan the pager properly stopped and opened on one channel, yet alerted to a page from a different channel while “stopped” on the original one! It almost seemed it was still scanning in the background while playing audio on the stop channel.

I have sent trace logs to unication but not heard if this is a reported problem or if they have any news on the issue. I am retired so the missed pages is more of a nuisance, but I understand the detrimental effect on mission-critical use.

Sorry to hear you have this issue, but relieved at the same time that I am not the only one experiencing this. Good luck and I hope you get it resolved.

In fact I am using analog, two tone paging. However, I am only using one UHF frequency. My pager has the new firmware, the others have the old. We both still have interment issues. Cant say it happens day after day, but it has been happening more frequently. I can recall the Minitor III & IV having the same problems, but not the V and VI. These pagers obviously are also much much more technologically advanced also. I hope this is an issue Unication can figure out in their future models or updates.

 

[mpreece]

Well, everyone...

After 7 months of frustration and testing I finally have myG5 working at near 100% reliability on VHF analog 2-tone paging!

First off, I recorded the different frequencies and the pages on my Icom R-30. Turns out that many "missed pages" were due to noise on the tone generation or no/incomplete tone transmission (10% of the time). I also measured the tone lengths: 750ms key-up delay, tone a 1500ms and tone b 3500ms -- not the Motorola standard. I also added a gap after tone b which seems to have ended possible confusion in the decoding logic. Finally, I created a 2nd QCII protocol for long tone using standard Motorola timings. As the long tone pages occur on two discrete frequencies absent 2-tone activity, this works, so there is no possibility of confusion between two-tone and long tones. Consequently, in my silent scan list I have three frequencies with two-tone activity and two with long tones. It has worked flawlessly now for 4 continuous days.

The custom tone timings are: 1500-0-3500-100-8000-10-5000-4000-200-0. I presumed my dispatch center would have used standard timings, but now that I know that is not the case I have made the adjustment. The after page tone gap seems to help as well. Two of the agencies share a tone a frequency, while the third has that frequency on tone b. Without the end-of-page gap I wonder if this may have caused issues?

V1.2 seems to have been immune to the timing issues. So if you are on v1.3 or later and having problems, I suggest you verify your agencies' transmitted tone parameters.

I still miss some pages, but they are due to dispatch equipment problems!

 

[mpreece]

All,

I oversee the issuing and maintenance of pagers at my department. We have been using the G5 for probably two years now, issuing them to just about all our members. Recently, I have been approached about a few issues regarding alerting on UHF. Some I have also experienced myself. Our pagers seem to either alert for the wrong company, alert during the middle of a dispatcher talking, or not alert at all. I personally recently had the pager on "open" when our fire tone went out and the pager did not alert. I firmly believe this is not a reception issue, as we get great reception throughout our county. I understand this is an issue with pagers in general, however, we have invested quite a bit of money into the Unication name and hope for a positive outcome.

I'm sure this forum is filled with experts out there. Feel free to give me some suggestions that I can experiment with in the PPS in order to hopefully correct this issue. If you wish to see the PPS I am programming into these pagers, message me your email, and I will send it your way!

Thanks & stay safe,
Chris

I just noticed that your tone a parameter is set for ten seconds rather than one second. You might check that if you haven't already. Sorry I missed that the first time!