San Antonio ProVoice

[n4voxgill]

I believe that any company that tries to produce a scanner with ProVoice or OpenSky capability better have a large amount of money to hire attorneys. Macom/Tyco will take the issue into court and the legal fees will probable be several times the development and production costs. Only then we will know who was right.

But you are talking hundreds of millions of dollars of income to macom vs a few hundred thousand for the scanner manufactuers. This just indicates why it will be an all out fight by macom.

 

[rdale]

I have cards too... I've yet to post something that later turned out to be untrue. If I don't know, I keep my mouth shut. If I think, I say "I think."

 

[SCPD]

I believe that any company that tries to produce a scanner with ProVoice or OpenSky capability better have a large amount of money to hire attorneys.

OpenSky is based on CDPD. You can purchase and download the specs for that online. Within the confines of the CDPD protocol - they've done some funky things but the standards docs would put you in the ballpark.

Macom/Tyco will take the issue into court and the legal fees will probable be several times the development and production costs. Only then we will know who was right.

I haven't talked to MA/COM's counsel so I'm not going to presume their reaction. They might view this as an opportunity to sell more encryption upgrades to their existing ProVoice customers. As someone else pointed out - once upon a time there were no trunking scanners - then along came radios for EDACS, Motorola, and LTR. There were no digital trunking scanners, now we have radios to do P25 trunking and voice.

Call me crazy but I see things like MPT1327 and ProVoice as part of that evolution.

-rick

 

[loumaag]

Rick,

You make an interesting argument. Are you going to be in town (Houston) anytime in the near future?

 

[SCPD]

Yep. Looks like I'll be spending some time in San Antonio too.

 

[muddy mudskipper]

San Antonio, huh?

might be interesting to share some insights on this topic if you have some spare time while you drive through this fair city...

message me for contact info.

 

[VintageJon]

Muddy, et al-
I keep hearing stuff from S.A. that is supposed to be Pro Voice but shows up on 96 as MOT, so I I can only presume that it;s P-25...

Weird, but I'm Cleared-For-Weird, (my Weird Clearance in intact...)

Is the issue that we can't hear Pro-Voice or that we can't Trunk-Track themZ??? This is a very good question IMHO.

73's,
-Jon

 

[rescue161]

IMBE or AMBE?

I could have sworn that Pro-Voice was AMBE.

 

[rdale]

You can't hear ProVoice _and_ you can't trunk them with any scanner on the market today...

 

[loumaag]

I could have sworn that Pro-Voice was AMBE.

No, IMBE.

You can't hear ProVoice _and_ you can't trunk them with any scanner on the market today...

Although this statement is true, it does not really say everything. There are no scanners on the market that can decode the ProVoice digital signal. The scanners do indeed trunk track the systems (unless ESK is involved); what happens is when the channel grant is given by the CCh, it is recognized as a ProVoice (digital) channel grant and the scanner ignores it. Rob's comment (as written) would lead you to believe that there is something different about EDACS systems using ProVoice that prevents such tracking. A small distinction, but an important one.

 

[Cowthief]

Yes, for the most part correct.

Hello.

First off, IMBE is in fact DVSI, and is the format used by both APCO25 and ProVoice.
Yes, there is a minor change in how the radios are modulated.
Yes, there are people who monitor the San Antonio system with a "real" ProVoice radio.
So far, it would seem, no real news.
The EDACS aware scanner CAN be converted to do ProVoice, but that means the DVSI eval' board and a fair bit of hacking, in the end it is easier to simply get a radio.
What I wanted to do was make people aware of the options.

 

[muddy mudskipper]

moving beyond the issue of whether a properly programmed EDACS radio can decode ProVoice, i heard an interesting rumor early this year that the newest version of EDACS Programmer can now handle programming of an ESK value without the presence of external smartcard hardware.

however, some minimum requirements must be met:

1) the radio must have at least 1024K of memory.
2) the radio must have the ESK option enabled in its feature string.

anyone care to weigh in on this?

i've never witnessed the so-called ESK Smartcard hardware in use, just heard about it many years ago. in fact, i may have confused it with the more-common use of a hardware encryption keyloader (similar to Motorola's keyloader hardware), but if MA/COM has indeed incorporated ESK key value programming directly into Programmer, then the process is getting simpler.