LTE 2 way radios will make commercial LMR systems a thing of the past

[INDY72]

I thought Nextel was dead and buried. Shows ya what I know.

We still have an ancient Nextel Motorola analog TRS here, and one down in MS, that still has a couple of users. The only iDEN systems still in use that I know of though are SoLinc, and AirINC. Not to mention Nextel is still the big license holders for all that old PS bandwidth that is still being renewed every few years. Not being put to use as far as I can tell, just held onto.

 

[emcom]

As stated, cell radios are not intended for primary public safety communications. What happens if the system goes down for whatever reason? Then what? There is no direct mode so you'd be SOL, and here they are trying to save lives. These radios we are discussing here on this thread are business oriented LTE radios.

For the money everyone is spending on expensive 700Mhz equipment that doesn't work well anyway, you should look into a location to set up your own VHF or UHF analog public safety grade repeater. That way YOU have control of it. Subscriber radios can then be had for cheap(er). Not every dept especially rural needs a fancy whiz bang P25 trunked radio system. Analog conventional still works just fine, and is very economical. Good luck!

PTT over LTE has been issued out. We still will have the old P25 radios in the car (maybe the handhelds too). We have been testing them out and the voice is much clearer than P25. We will see if it holds up. Let me be clear, this is for a couple of small departments, so less than 20 officers. Not countywide.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

PTT over LTE has been issued out. We still will have the old P25 radios in the car (maybe the handhelds too). We have been testing them out and the voice is much clearer than P25. We will see if it holds up. Let me be clear, this is for a couple of small departments, so less than 20 officers. Not countywide.

Curious to see if you find 2100 ms of latency acceptable. Bear min mind, P25 spec calls for a maximum latency of 500 ms encode to decode when transitioning an RFSS.

 

[jim202]

12dbsinad said:
As stated, cell radios are not intended for primary public safety communications. What happens if the system goes down for whatever reason? Then what? There is no direct mode so you'd be SOL, and here they are trying to save lives. These radios we are discussing here on this thread are business oriented LTE radios.

For the money everyone is spending on expensive 700 MHz equipment that doesn't work well anyway, you should look into a location to set up your own VHF or UHF analog public safety grade repeater. That way YOU have control of it. Subscriber radios can then be had for cheap(er). Not every dept especially rural needs a fancy whiz bang P25 trunked radio system. Analog conventional still works just fine, and is very economical. Good luck!


I have a hard time understanding your comment that "700 equipment doesn't work". If that was the case, we would not see the mass migration to it around the country. However, I will say that it works only as good as the system was designed and installed.

Here in Louisiana, if you have a radio on the LWIN 700 MHz. system installed by the state, you can actually go just about any place in the state and stay on your normal dispatch talk group and still talk to your Dispatcher.

In our Parish (County to most other people), you can even use a portable radio in most buildings here in St. Tammany Parish and still get into the trunking system. Can't be using stubby antennas on the portable, but the system works. All the towers are linked by microwave and not telco supplied lines. Each tower has a back up generator to keep the site operational if the local electrical power goes out. Some sites are raised above the ground due to flooding and others are on the ground.

Bottom line, any radio system is only as good as the design and installation.

 

[12dbsinad]

12dbsinad said:
As stated, cell radios are not intended for primary public safety communications. What happens if the system goes down for whatever reason? Then what? There is no direct mode so you'd be SOL, and here they are trying to save lives. These radios we are discussing here on this thread are business oriented LTE radios.

For the money everyone is spending on expensive 700 MHz equipment that doesn't work well anyway, you should look into a location to set up your own VHF or UHF analog public safety grade repeater. That way YOU have control of it. Subscriber radios can then be had for cheap(er). Not every dept especially rural needs a fancy whiz bang P25 trunked radio system. Analog conventional still works just fine, and is very economical. Good luck!


I have a hard time understanding your comment that "700 equipment doesn't work". If that was the case, we would not see the mass migration to it around the country. However, I will say that it works only as good as the system was designed and installed.

Here in Louisiana, if you have a radio on the LWIN 700 MHz. system installed by the state, you can actually go just about any place in the state and stay on your normal dispatch talk group and still talk to your Dispatcher.

In our Parish (County to most other people), you can even use a portable radio in most buildings here in St. Tammany Parish and still get into the trunking system. Can't be using stubby antennas on the portable, but the system works. All the towers are linked by microwave and not telco supplied lines. Each tower has a back up generator to keep the site operational if the local electrical power goes out. Some sites are raised above the ground due to flooding and others are on the ground.

Bottom line, any radio system is only as good as the design and installation.

I was responding to the post I quoted. He said the 700 system doesn't cover their area well (I would assume lack of sites in the area), that's what I was referring too.

 

[emcom]

12dbsinad said:
As stated, cell radios are not intended for primary public safety communications. What happens if the system goes down for whatever reason? Then what? There is no direct mode so you'd be SOL, and here they are trying to save lives. These radios we are discussing here on this thread are business oriented LTE radios.

For the money everyone is spending on expensive 700 MHz equipment that doesn't work well anyway, you should look into a location to set up your own VHF or UHF analog public safety grade repeater. That way YOU have control of it. Subscriber radios can then be had for cheap(er). Not every dept especially rural needs a fancy whiz bang P25 trunked radio system. Analog conventional still works just fine, and is very economical. Good luck!


I have a hard time understanding your comment that "700 equipment doesn't work". If that was the case, we would not see the mass migration to it around the country. However, I will say that it works only as good as the system was designed and installed.

Here in Louisiana, if you have a radio on the LWIN 700 MHz. system installed by the state, you can actually go just about any place in the state and stay on your normal dispatch talk group and still talk to your Dispatcher.

In our Parish (County to most other people), you can even use a portable radio in most buildings here in St. Tammany Parish and still get into the trunking system. Can't be using stubby antennas on the portable, but the system works. All the towers are linked by microwave and not telco supplied lines. Each tower has a back up generator to keep the site operational if the local electrical power goes out. Some sites are raised above the ground due to flooding and others are on the ground.

Bottom line, any radio system is only as good as the design and installation.

Considering LA's highest elevation in the whole state is 535 feet, the signal has very little to block it. In our town, we are 581' between 2 - 1500'+ mountains (hills to those in the west) and several smaller (1,000 - 1,200') hills. We have lots of shadows. Plus, to outfit a car with a radio and a man with a radio is $7,000 for P25. Our radio system has 95-96% coverage, but when you regularly work in that 4% and it is rural versus urban, no one wants to pay a Million bucks for tower and trunk radios/site equipment.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

Considering LA's highest elevation in the whole state is 535 feet, the signal has very little to block it. In our town, we are 581' between 2 - 1500'+ mountains (hills to those in the west) and several smaller (1,000 - 1,200') hills. We have lots of shadows. Plus, to outfit a car with a radio and a man with a radio is $7,000 for P25. Our radio system has 95-96% coverage, but when you regularly work in that 4% and it is rural versus urban, no one wants to pay a Million bucks for tower and trunk radios/site equipment.

I mean...you'd be surprised what trees can attenuate. Bastrop County, TX supposedly left the LCRA 900 MHz system they were on for a 700 MHz simulcast system tied into the City of Austin's GATRRS core due to the pine needles causing 20+ dB more attenuation at 900 MHz compared to 700 MHz.

That being said, don't forget about Colorado's DTRS system. It's a very effective system, in fact it's effective enough that the local SO of a county I have property in has migrated their dispatch operations to DTRS (though all of the cruisers keep VHF as a secondary). That's impressive considering their VHF site was one awesome site (10,000' ASL with direct LOS to Colorado Springs 80 miles away). The VFD still operates on VHF though to keep the equipment costs down.

 

[merlin]

I was hoping to get some monitoring of our state police, yhey still use a VHF system but have updated to a dual band affair on 700 Mhgz.
I see that low end for public safety is LTE and nothing else showing in the band.

 

[t9590th]

Our county has been using Mutualink for our LTE to LMR communications and it works great. Personally I have 3 mobile radios in my family and a handheld on its way. LTE communications in my opinion is the future. Zello offers a lot of free services for public safety as well, but you get what you pay for. Use Zello to test and when you fall in love with LTE communications you will want to upgrade to Mutualink for their gateway systems to connect your VHF, UHF or 800 MHz radio to your cellular phone systems.

 

[MTS2000des]

we demo'ed Mutualink a couple of years ago. It did integrate into our system (actually setup a console presence on our MCC7500s) very well. Much more refined experience than a simple Zello radio gateway.

The biggest issue was the cost. It was cheaper than Wave, which was what our system vendor was pushing, but was still a high cost of entry. But as you said, one gets what one pays for. In the end, I built a simple radio gateway and setup a Zello server. It is for NON-CRITICAL admin folks and us in radio support to play with.

Total cost to taxpayers: zero. Surplus desktop PC, SignalLink USB donated from home, spare APX4500 and cabling built by yours truly. It works pretty well for when we need it to.

 

[phadobas]

I'm wondering how is cell phone service and LTE radio service holding up right now in Laura's path. Anybody knows?

 

[buddrousa]

I know on good days our local ambulance service hates them and they only cover 60% of their service area.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

I'm wondering how is cell phone service and LTE radio service holding up right now in Laura's path. Anybody knows?

One of the test bed's for FirstNet was Houston. They lost sites but overall, coverage was not greatly affected when Harvey went through in 2018. However, AT&T built after TxWARN had already been built out with several stages of redundancy so there wasn't a massive need for it to survive other than to give AT&T the ability to say it did.

 

[12dbsinad]

One of the test bed's for FirstNet was Houston. They lost sites but overall, coverage was not greatly affected when Harvey went through in 2018. However, AT&T built after TxWARN had already been built out with several stages of redundancy so there wasn't a massive need for it to survive other than to give AT&T the ability to say it did.

The biggest downfall for LTE is the backhaul. The use of fiber is widespread and once that goes down you're pretty much SOL. The sites themselves are pretty robust and usually meet a lot better standards than some cobbled together LMR system built by a guy that runs a radio shop out of his mothers basement. One of those is tower loading. Cell companies usually follow this to the tee. On the LMR side of things many just throw things up without a structural study done. Wind loading makes a BIG difference when you're talking hurricanes with 150 MPH winds.

 

[alcahuete]

The biggest downfall for LTE is the backhaul. The use of fiber is widespread and once that goes down you're pretty much SOL.

This is the exact issue we have run into in the aviation industry. Everything has been moved from microwave links to fiber, and we have learned the hard way that once the fiber is out, it's game over. It's an unfortunate lesson.

 

[gman1971]

I think the Gen2 TRBO radios, XPR7550e with WiFi already have the option to do PTToWiFi stuff... or so I've understood from reading some documentation... For business, saving on infrastructure is certainly huge, the real problem is you need infrastructure to get some decent range on LMR... the downside to this is that you'll always be using someone else's infrastructure, so if it goes down, you're SOL. Also, whoever controls the infrastructure can determine location, find out where you are, etc... which might, or might not be desirable.

The thing that is really going to make all this LTE obsolete is SpaceX's Starlink: I strongly believe that once that thing is up in the air, with the full sat constellation in place, orbiting around and fully operational, its game over for any land based 5G, 3G, xG, cable, fiber, whatever solution... You simply can't compete in coverage with a full Earth coverage solution; even in the middle of the ocean you'll still have full bars on your Starlink receiver, middle of Sahara? no problem either.... Starlink would work even after a major disaster, a major hurricane, a major flood, a major fire, a major earthquake... good luck with 5G in situations like what happened to Puerto Rico... Heck, Starlink will probably work for a long while even after full nuclear MAD scenario happened on the surface of the planet... I think the future is not 5G, its Starlink...

G.

Icom, Kenwood, Motorola and others have or will soon have a "Mobile" radio that uses the LTE cellular backbone instead of the LMR backbone. It looks like a traditional vehicle mounted mobile radio just is a Cellular based PTT specific radio.

Think Icom A120 form factor and LTE..

 

[chrismol1]

Im very excited for Starlink, internet anywhere with low latency and there can be more possibilities.

and there are companies trying cellular satellites with off the shelf cell phones with a little modification. The goal was to try to see if its feasible for a regular cell phone to connect with a cellular satellite network, I think it needed a little more power but it worked on off the shelf cell phones with a little module that boosted the uplink and a better antenna than the integrated ones now. It probably worked well with old phones with big pull up antennas

 

[garys]

Starlinks ground terminal antenna technology is going to have to improve dramatically to make a mobile phone practical. Right now, the antennas are fixed and aimed at a portion of the sky where there are satellites.

ETA: The antenna is a bit more complex than I initially described. It's more like a ham antenna with both horizontal and vertical. The terminal moves the antenna if it loses signal or gets a poor quality signal. Still, it's not currently viable for a handheld device. Maybe an RV and less likely a passenger car.

That's a far cry from a cell phone or even the current satellite phones.

 

[TampaTyron]

LTE PTT is the future, with a fail over to wifi and/or failover to a trunked system if there is nothing less. TT

 

[gman1971]

Maybe, maybe not. We'll have to wait and see.

G.

LTE PTT is the future, with a fail over to wifi and/or failover to a trunked system if there is nothing less. TT