MONOC Dispatch North

[mondaro]

Good Afternoon,

I guess I can take some credit here, I requested from MONOC if they could put the North and
South Operations channels online, I use the north for situational awareness here at work and unit 257 post
at my quarters, I am happy to see both feeds up and running. Special Thanks to Jeff and Pete
from MONOC or getting on this as soon as they did.

Tony Mondaro, EMT
Chief
North Arlington EMS
Bergen County, NJ

 

[RadioDitch]

Good Afternoon,

I guess I can take some credit here, I requested from MONOC if they could put the North and
South Operations channels online, I use the north for situational awareness here at work and unit 257 post
at my quarters, I am happy to see both feeds up and running. Special Thanks to Jeff and Pete
from MONOC or getting on this as soon as they did.

Tony Mondaro, EMT
Chief
North Arlington EMS
Bergen County, NJ

Should have figured you'd have SOMETHING to do with it. lol. Well done Tony.

 

[slingshot202]

Should have figured you'd have SOMETHING to do with it. lol. Well done Tony.

With MONOC doing coverage in my town at times I am interested in keeping tune with them as well.

Can get some interesting calls from this end and a good heads up on stuff too.

 

[elias1988]

Nice job Tony! Thanks!

 

[902]

The "claim" was always that there was an illegal user in the Elizabeth/Staten Island area in close proximity on the band to their frequency that was putting out some seriously beyond legal limit power, causing serious bleedover and intermod in general. To me it generally sounded more like MONOC's repeater output was off frequency.

Finding a frequency pair that is available to work over a wide area anywhere in Northeastern NJ is an utter and complete horror show. It's a world of first-come-first-served, and, if a business channel is used, there is no protection from another user. If a legacy "Special Emergency" frequency is used (155.175, 155.205, etc.), there may be less protection, as those frequencies are loaded similar to business channels. Putting them on a police, fire, "PX" or medical frequency is like finding a round hole to fit a square peg into. Frequency coordination up there is terrible, even for a one square mile borough. Compound that with what seems to be the (still) imminent loss of T-Band (which might have worked for them, if the FCC had not frozen new applications). There would be nowhere to build-out a radio system on. It's decades of extremely poor spectrum management and singularly consumptive use.

Think about the Sonim stuff as practice. They're using commercial LTE. If FishNet gets off the ground, they can reprogram the stuff and use the public safety network's LTE.

I'm glad MONOC is streaming those voice paths. Gentlemen, in my view, that's the future of scanning if more things move to LTE. It's not over, it'll just be different.

 

[902]

Some observations from the feeds...

I'm listening to the south feed. Some things that might improve their operations -

Analog-emulating compression. Some stuff is very loud, some stuff is not loud at all. Reminds me of the first go-around of implementing a P25 system before we had optimization down. There was a critical digital AGC setting on the radios themselves that made the audio sound much, much better with consistent volume levels. This is the first time I'm hearing this, I'm amused and I kinda think it's nifty, but I don't know if the equipment as it is can be optimized.

Some kind of end-of-message indication. Maybe they get some kind of visual indicator, but listening, it's too quiet to know if someone's stopped talking or not. I hate "courtesy tones," but a short, low volume level beep might be something that could be beneficial for them.

The echo/feedback. Sounds like maybe a portable or mobile device is left on and in earshot as someone's talking into another device.