Slated for Dec 31, 2020, Lancaster county will no longer be paging on low band two tone pagers. Paging is expected to become part of the county wide p25 system. Updates to follow.
Lancaster County Dumping Low Band Paging
- Thread starter Twister_2
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Not horribly surprised on that one. They have the infrastructure for the alpha paging system, it was only a matter of time before they pulled the plug on the low band stuff. I’m wondering if this will include the rebroadcast stuff on 33.86 and whatnot.
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33 MHz will no longer have LCWC Fire/EMS traffic..... They will all go silent. 
It'll be just like York County...
It'll be just like York County...
33 MHz will no longer have LCWC Fire/EMS traffic..... They will all go silent.
It'll be just like York County...
Eh maybe not just like York. They are planning on using P25 paging (I thought York only uses alpha)...either two tone over P25 or the correct way of talkgroup voice dispatch.
Er,
Was simply referring to what a casual (dare say average) scanner user will observe. Look at York Co RRDB page, Lancaster will be very similar. No more 33 MHz. There are MANY scanner users in the Lanco area who have not upgraded their scanners, They will be crying foul when they no longer hear anything.... They don't come here.. They don't even know this place exists... they don't know what pager tones are either (P25 or otherwise)
All they'll know is their radio is silent.. There have been recent posts over in the York forums asking where the conventional stuff went.. That was the simple extent of what I was trying to say...
Was simply referring to what a casual (dare say average) scanner user will observe. Look at York Co RRDB page, Lancaster will be very similar. No more 33 MHz. There are MANY scanner users in the Lanco area who have not upgraded their scanners, They will be crying foul when they no longer hear anything.... They don't come here.. They don't even know this place exists... they don't know what pager tones are either (P25 or otherwise)
All they'll know is their radio is silent..
There have been recent posts over in the York forums asking where the conventional stuff went.. That was the simple extent of what I was trying to say...
Gotcha. I'm going through the same thing in Luzerne county. The old men think digital means encrypted...Er,
Was simply referring to what a casual (dare say average) scanner user will observe. Look at York Co RRDB page, Lancaster will be very similar. No more 33 MHz. There are MANY scanner users in the Lanco area who have not upgraded their scanners, They will be crying foul when they no longer hear anything.... They don't come here.. They don't even know this place exists... they don't know what pager tones are either (P25 or otherwise)
All they'll know is their radio is silent..
I'm not trolling or breaking balls, but am genuinely curious why you consider talkgroup voice dispatch the "correct" way. I assume you're referring to the original method the Unication pagers required, which was a dedicated talkgroup for each agency/alert? Or are you talking about conventional P25 vs trunking?
Yeah no worries. Every time I hear QC II over P25, the tones morph in one way or another. In many cases the tones actually change frequency fairly significantly. This is easy to prove with one receiver on analog and the other on P25. In other cases, the encoder causes some kind of separate tone artifact that actually makes the tones sound like DTMF. In every case that I've experienced, tones over P25 warble, chop in and out, and click to the point that I'd have to imagine a pager with tight tolerances will reject. I will say that I have not looked at Unication's specs, but I know that with an xts, a slightly "off" sounding tone will not alert. Another possibility that I haven't investigated yet is if somehow the counties that use QC over P25 change the tone pairs to be tones that aren't affected by P25 as much as the others. Some tones pairs are definitely screwed with more than others.
Here's a video I took years ago of Centre County blowing tones over P25. It was their weekly test so you can hear how each tone is affected.
I was in Adams Co this weekend...I should have recorded analog and P25 side by side to measure the frequency shift on the tones.
I was in Adams Co this weekend...I should have recorded analog and P25 side by side to measure the frequency shift on the tones.
It is true that the tones vary somewhat between analog and P25. That's actually done on purpose, as the tone frequencies are "standardized" by the DVSI vocoder. In fact, they actually differ between FDMA and TDMA as well, with TDMA offering more available tones than FDMA (better AMBE+2 vocoder). If you have APX CPS, check out the help file for Tone Signaling, it shows the charts for FDMA and TDMA and how a range of Hz are standardized to one tone when encoding/decoding over P25.
From a system admin point of view, provisioning a talkgroup per agency or alert is grossly inefficient. Not so much that a modern P25 system can't handle hundreds or thousands of talkgroups, but more from the perspective of setting up console paging resources. And, of course, if you want to setup scan lists in your radios to monitor pages for various agencies, you may quickly run out of room in your scan lists.
Believe it or not, but the Tone Signaling option in the APX is very robust and pretty awesome. We've got some agencies using it on our TDMA system, and there have been no complaints of missed pages aside from the occasional miss that could occur over analog. I suspect that the Unication are just as robust. The nice thing about the range of Hz getting standardized over P25 is that there's actually a bit more leeway if there's a bit of distortion in the tones.
It's also worth mentioning that obviously the radio encoding the tones should be of good quality, preferably a system console. Otherwise you wind up with garbage in = garbage out.
From a system admin point of view, provisioning a talkgroup per agency or alert is grossly inefficient. Not so much that a modern P25 system can't handle hundreds or thousands of talkgroups, but more from the perspective of setting up console paging resources. And, of course, if you want to setup scan lists in your radios to monitor pages for various agencies, you may quickly run out of room in your scan lists.
Believe it or not, but the Tone Signaling option in the APX is very robust and pretty awesome. We've got some agencies using it on our TDMA system, and there have been no complaints of missed pages aside from the occasional miss that could occur over analog. I suspect that the Unication are just as robust. The nice thing about the range of Hz getting standardized over P25 is that there's actually a bit more leeway if there's a bit of distortion in the tones.
It's also worth mentioning that obviously the radio encoding the tones should be of good quality, preferably a system console. Otherwise you wind up with garbage in = garbage out.
Okay so that is one thing I suspected...that they use specific tones that aren't changed in the encoding process as much. I guess that means Lanco might need to change the tones that are used to conform to that list. Adams is the only TDMA tone county I've monitored and my sample size is very small, but they do seem to morph less on that system, even though the pitch definitely changes on some. Your reply helps a lot, mainly because I was hoping there is a list out there of tones that DO work over P25. I'll look over the help file tonight. Thank you for relieving my stress about this....now if only these counties would follow suit.
If you can't find the tone charts in CPS let me know and I'll post them here. I can also post some sound clips of tones being transmitted over TDMA trunking. They are encoded by the MCC 7500 system consoles, and recorded over the air using an APX. I think you'll agree that they sound pretty good, very little warbling or distortion.
I'll get the help file myself but I'd like to hear your tones..
Here ya go, QCII test recorded on the 6th. No editing done to the original recording except to crop it down.
Vocaroo | Voice message
Vocaroo | Voice message
Here is the analog version of the same test for comparison. This was recorded as streamed over Broadcastify; direct console connection to an Instreamer.
Vocaroo | Voice message
Vocaroo | Voice message
Did unication ever change the p25 pagers to allow paging via call alert (ie using the radio id of your base station for your dept) vs needing a seperate alert talkgroup for each dept. That would never work for my county as we have at least 100 vol fire depts.
My understanding of P25 pagers was that it used astro signaling / select call until a few weeks ago when I saw a Unication set up with a specific talkgroup. I would have to think sending a call to a specific RID would be endlessly more efficient than the talkgroup method.
These are the best tones over P25 I've ever heard. I was stuck in Centre County where they probably just pipe the tones OTA without much after thought...also a phase I system. @SlipNutz15 should be able to comment on how exactly the tones got from the generator to the radios but since all paging was done on a UHF analog link, I don't think any effort was put into making the tones sound ok on P25.
Supposedly the Unication pagers are now capable of paging via call alert. My understanding of how it works is that all of the pagers for a given agency have the same unique radio ID assigned to them. Pager works just like two-tone but instead of audible tones over the air, it's a millisecond of data over the control channel. I'm not sure, however, if it works while you're using the Unication as a monitoring device and it's on a voice channel.
My thoughts exactly. It's pretty wasteful of talkgroup and channel resources to have a dedicated talkgroup for each agency, especially when you can do two tone or call alert over the P25 dispatch talkgroup (or a county-wide talkgroup dedicated to paging).
Actually if you're using a system which is composed mostly of stand-alone sites as opposed to simulcast sites, "talkgroup" paging is still enormously wasteful, especially when you consider that the paging talkgroups usually have to be made "hot" on every site in and around a county in order to ensure that the Unication pagers can receive the run no matter what site they're monitoring. Ohio MARCS is unfortunately moving down this road and loading issues won't be far behind (even though they'll deny that).
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