Hang time rejections on TRBO/DMR

[km6rum]

Hi all, I set up a MotoTRBO UHF repeater system (a pair of SLR5700 repeaters, not trunked) for work (land mobile/commercial), but I’m having a recurring intermittent issue with some radios not being able to key up a reply to a transmission during the group call hang time on our repeater channels. It doesn’t happen very often, and about half the time, I think the user has the wrong channel selected (I have a paging channel to enable one-way communication from another department, I can describe it if need be.)

This doesn’t happen often enough be big deal, except that I now am fed up with Motorola and their apparent hatred for their customers. I’m demoing a Kenwood handheld radio, and it seems that it works great, except it never is able to transmit during the entire SIT, nevermind during the group call hang time. I went into this with very little formal training in TRBO or DMR, so there could be something I did wrong. I mostly left the defaults on the repeaters alone, with a 6-second SIT, and 3000ms group call hang time. Is there a best practice for those settings?

I’m open to the possibility that it’s the Kenwood radio not being configured right. I’ve been working with MotoTRBO for a few years now, but the Kenwood for only a day. The “selcall on PTT” setting has the same groupID as the radio I’m talking to, the group ID list has identical members to the Motorola radio’s Digital Contacts group calls. Busy Channel Lockout is set to “Correct CC” and In-call Busy Channel Lockout is set to “Follow BCL”, which seems analogous to Admit Criteria and In Call Criteria on the Motorola side.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I’d love to mix in some Kenwoods in my system but my repeaters need to play nice with them.

 

[tyler3328]

Your repeater may be setup to ID itself after transmissions which is tying up the system. Check the repeater ID settings or Set your transmit criteria to always and see if that solves your issue. I’m a moto person and couldn’t answer anyone on Kenwood

 

[n1das]

I’m open to the possibility that it’s the Kenwood radio not being configured right. I’ve been working with MotoTRBO for a few years now, but the Kenwood for only a day. The “selcall on PTT” setting has the same groupID as the radio I’m talking to, the group ID list has identical members to the Motorola radio’s Digital Contacts group calls. Busy Channel Lockout is set to “Correct CC” and In-call Busy Channel Lockout is set to “Follow BCL”, which seems analogous to Admit Criteria and In Call Criteria on the Motorola side.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I’d love to mix in some Kenwoods in my system but my repeaters need to play nice with them.

I think this is it. It may be working the opposite of what you think. BCL set to Correct CC to me suggests that a busy lockout is to occur when the correct CC is received and is the opposite of what you want. It technically is a Lockout instead of an Admit. BCL = Off or None would suggest being equivalent to Admit Criteria = Always.

 

[km6rum]

I tested BCL = Off, and indeed that is the equivalent of Admit = Always. But that just allows the unit to transmit impolitely. I want it locked out during the actual transmission from another unit, but it should be able to transmit during group call hang time immediately afterwards, which is what the Motorola docs say the group call hang time is for. I suppose I could turn GCHT off, or minimize it and the SIT, but it does seem to work more smoothly with those features.

 

[slicerwizard]

I now am fed up with Motorola and their apparent hatred for their customers.

I’d love to mix in some Kenwoods in my system but my repeaters need to play nice with them.

Yeah, sounds like you've got that backwards. The repeater sends proper TLC frames for three seconds and the Kenwood refuses to engage. Looks like the post above should get you sorted.

 

[km6rum]

Yes, I worded that awkwardly. Because I feel the hate from Motorola (from things not mentioned here), I now want to introduce non-Motorola radios into the system, with the aim of my system being Motorola-free after a time. I have every confidence that the repeater is behaving as designed, but I don't know the settings to get the Kenwood to adopt the same behavior as the Motorola radios. Turning off politeness to own color code is untenable, due to some departments having a rather low level of radio discipline. And I'm not in a place to demand changes to radio training at this time, so a technical solution is all I have.

 

[slicerwizard]

Well, DSD+ lets you see what the repeater is doing as well as what the radios are doing. I'd use it to gather information and go from there.