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Is EDACS still proprietary?

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ghostship

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Can any of the newer high-end public safety radios be used on an EDACS system, or is it still proprietary? If so, does anyone know a source for MA/COM P7100IP's, or a radio that has the equivalent functionality? Thanks.
 

greenthumb

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EDACS is still proprietary and radios for use on that system can only come from GE/Ericsson/Comnet Ericsson/M/A-COM/Tyco Electronics/Harris. Their entire line of current high tier radios can still operate on EDACS systems. The best source for a P7100 will be Ebay, or directly from your local Harris sales representative. You may be able to find some in the RR classified section, too. Good luck!
 

ghostship

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Thank you! That's exactly what I needed to know, and saved me a bunch of time. Much appreciated.
 

ElroyJetson

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My personal belief is that EDACS and all other non-P25 system types will be dropped by Harris as quickly as they can make it happen. Harris is fully committed to P25 and I think it is inevitable that they will strongly encourage or force all of their legacy customers to upgrade or migrate to P25 systems in due time.


Elroy
 

ghostship

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That's good to know too. My situation is unique: I am the director of a search and rescue team. We have our own comms, but the coordinator for any given search needs to be able to communcate on the county-wide public safety system (EDACS, Digital/Analog, trunking, etc). We can borrow radios from the Emergency Management office on a serach -by-search basis, but I am getting permission to purchase our own. Looks like one used/refurbished P7100IP to be shared by the weekly coordinator-on-call will serve our purposes for now.

I'd really like/need/crave to have a new Unity multiband...but I'm thinking since I have to ask about price, I can't afford it ;)
 

LMR_Dude

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Harris has not announced that the Unity will support EDACS and most folks don't anticipate they ever will.
 

SCPD

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Honestly .. I think that it is time that people learned that they are getting suckered into P25 systems that they don't need when their existing systems are just fine. But guess they will live and learn.

There is nothing wrong with Edacs, it is a tried and true technology and many times cheaper than these overpriced P25 systems that seem to be the rage. But from what I have seen from the local P25 system .. it doesn't do anything that they couldn't get from an Edacs system.

Here they are looking to replace a perfectly acceptable VHF system with a 700 MHz system which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) and work worse than the existing system. That I can almost guarantee them ... but LOL they will realize they have been suckered when all is said and done.

I don't really look into the politics much of these systems all the know that Harris and others are suckering their customers to buy into systems that will make their (Harris / Motorola etc) pockets fatter and give the customer in a lot of cases a system that works worse than their existing systems.
 

ElroyJetson

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EDACS is now a limited lifespan legacy format that will be going away. This is simply because (a) it is proprietary to the MINOR market player and nobody else would support it even if the licensing fee was FREE.

EDACS was developed long before the concept of IP connectivity was developed. Now there's EDACS IP and Extended Addressing, but those are simply steps toward P25.

M/A-Com (prior to the Harris acquisition) was pushing toward P25. Harris is pushing harder. EVERYBODY is pushing toward P25 because it is a STANDARD, and it does work quite well,
though I think that it needs to be migrated to the AMBE-2 vocoder instead of regular IMBE. I think
that that will be a future standards enhancement. AMBE-2 is incredibly better than IMBE.

.Fed wants everybody to go to P25 standards. So everybody will....whether conventional or trunking.

Elroy
 

otter9309

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All formats that are not P25 will have a limited lifespan. Only P25 request are being funded through grant dollars these days.
 

morganAL

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I know for a fact that the last radio that Harris will build that will have EDACS in it is the P7300/M7300. I also know that Harris has said that they are not going to put EDACS into the Unity radio. The Unity was not designed with EDACS in mind and to go back and add it would require major changes. They are currently focusing their efforts on getting P-25 Trunking added to the Unity. EDACS is on the way out and Harris is already talking with users about migrating to either P-25 or OpenSky. The migration paths are P-25 for public safety and OpenSky for Utilities.
 

ElroyJetson

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I'm surprised they're pushing OpenSky AT ALL. Although it was originally developed by AMP Wireless Systems for FedEx's real-time RF-based package tracking system. It COULD do well for certain utilty applications but is apparently a colossal failure in a voice public safety application.

Elroy
 

morganAL

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According to the folks at Harris. Harris has devoted a team of 25-30 Engineers from all parts of Harris, not just the acquired M/A-COM folks, to fix the bugs and straighten OpenSky out. Obviously it won't happen overnight but I think they are on the right track.
 

ElroyJetson

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I still think they should just junk it completely, It's an unnecessarily complex system and it's very hard to overcome a bad reputation earned early in the product's life.

To fix it will mean to totally redesign it. Why invest the effort? Sell P25 instead.


Elroy
 

morganAL

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I admit it is complex, but it does have a few overall features that are good ideas if the system as a whole works. 19.2K mobile data is nice... at least better than 9.6k available on other TRS. The small cell site repeater is also nice. 4-slot TDMA in a compact package that can be mounted on a utility pole. Yes, I know you still have to have backhaul equipment but still can be done without having to build a tower and drop in a shelter. I agree it has gotten a black eye and it may never recover from that.

Is P-25 really the best choice? From the end user perspective, it isn't really much different than the EDACS or Moto system they were on before. There is the digital voice, it has it's own "sound" but there is no static. I am sure there are fringe area issues with garbled audio or other artifacts but I am by no means an expert there. My biggest gripe with P-25 is the cost of the radios. P-25 is hyped as the greatest thing since sliced bread, end-all inter-op problems, best thing for public safety radio system but the price of user equipment is in my opinion outrageous. When a radio costs 1/2 the price of a Crown Vic Police Package... Ok maybe not half but still a significant amount. What about Tetra? I know very little about it but I hear that it is a good system and equipment is not as expensive.
 
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Tetra has significantly cheaper terminals than P25, but the dirty little secret is that the infrastructure is a LOT more expensive. AFAIK there's also no Tetra simulcast, so frequency reuse becomes a major headache in network design.

Finally there's the small issue of frequency choice - again, as far as I know there isn't any Tetra outside of the UHF band - although there might be non-standard demonstration systems the mainstream (cheap) Tetra gear is all UHF.

OpenSky has a big advantage in that it gets 4 talkpaths into a 25kHz wide channel - 6.25kHz equivalence - which very little else actually manages. P25 phase 2 is supposed to do this but isn't available yet (Moto's P2 system is non-standard, of course).
 
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