Palmetto 800 encryption

[krs3]

Is this common in SC and does it look like more agencies will be using it. Just trying to decide whether or not to purchase another digital scanner and I was warned that within the next year that many Dept will encrypt their transmissions and scanner will be no good for Palmetto 800. Do y'all think this is going to happen? Is there a lot of expense to for agencies to encrypt their radio and would this affect interoperability? Thanks

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[trunktracker71]

its not all that common here yet but who knows what the next year hold as of right now theres noy all lot of it going on except for Lexington county and counties like beaufort which is p 25 phase 2 and York who also is p 25 phase 1 but from what I have heard like where I am in Florence all that is going to happen is they are going digital but only some of the talkgroups will be encrypted they just are not able to afford it so you can get one but I personally would wait until these new phase 2 scanners come out at the first of the year

 

[qball]

I think you are still okay buying another scanner at this point. I think you would still get a few good years out of it before you will see any mass migration to any type of encryption. I'll put it like this, I would buy one if I had the cash lying around.

By the way, the Beaufort system is not Phase 2. All of the P25 systems in SC are Phase 1 today. The standard encryption protocol on the Palmetto 800 4.1 is DES-XL. Most of the encryption on P25 is DES-OFB, although all of the newer Motorola radios (APX) generally come standard with ADP which is software based encryption which only works on the 9600 baud networks. AES-256 will likely become more prevalent in the future because of the enhanced security of that protocol. None of the protocols mentioned, hardware or software, can be monitored by a standard scanner.

Trunktracker71 is correct in saying that most of the agencies in SC use "clear" non-encrypted traffic whether on 4.1 or the P25 7.X platforms. However, I suspect that more of that will change as the Motorola P25 radios have ADP available in them at no extra charge (or nearly no cost).

q