Site Trunking

[doctordave]

Anyone (perhaps David will see this) have insight as to what actually happens when site trunking is enabled? I'd selected that for the Baltimore County MD 800 P1 system and was getting less-than-ideal system reception range....but that corrected, once I viewed David's webinar and subsequently de-selected site trunking. Just curious what the radio is actually doing differently when the radio is site trunking - and when that might actually be an advantage.

Loving this radio so far, here in the land of LSM.

Dave

 

[Jay911]

Site trunking is when a site or sites in a trunked system become isolated from the system controller (usually because whatever is connecting the site to the network - fiber, copper, satellite, microwave, etc - goes down, or is deliberately shut down). They're still operational as individual sites, but cannot communicate with the rest of the network. So if for example unit A is on site 1 and unit B is on site 2, and site 1 goes into site trunking, the trunk system and even the talkgroups the users are on will still appear to be functioning, but unit A and unit B won't hear one another.

How this applies to a one-way pager receiver is something I'm not able to answer. Perhaps "de-selecting site trunking" means that the receiver will not monitor a site that is in site trunking mode.

 

[policefreak]

I've always understood "Site Trunking" on the G4/5 PPS to mean that you can program multiple controllers which correspond to different sites within a system, and the device will choose the site that has the best reception and lock on to it.

 

[b1100mac]

I posed the very same question to Unication, "what does checking this box do", and I was told that in their testing they found it actually had no change in the way the radio operated. The radio will lock on the strongest control channel regardless of this setting. And remember when the radio loses signal on the site you are closest to at the time, it has to cycle through the "out of range" mode and come back up "in range" with the new (closer) site. I actually went into the software and changed my "out of range" time cycle to 5 seconds, so it switches faster.

 

[KevinC]

In a perfect world you'd be able to choose whether or not your radio stays on a site that is in site trunking so you won't miss any calls/pages/whatever that may come from a wireline console or from other units on a wide-area site.

I'd imagine that was the intent of this checkbox, but I don't know.

 

[doctordave]

Very interesting. Thanks for the replies. Not sure why my results were so different after de-selecting site trunking. Perhaps David from Unication will toss in some thoughts on this curiosity. Test travel from Baltimore City to Northern Baltimore County (monitoring the City and County P1 systems) today yielded superb results. Very happy with this radio.

 

[Thunderknight]

I would have also assumed site trunking referred to a disconnected site...meaning if the pager detects the site is isolated (lost backhaul), it will look for another site in range that has connectivity.

 

[tdeater]

The site trunking mode tells the pager if it can or can not use a tower site that is in site trunking error mode. It will not make any differences otherwise.

 

[cpetraglia]

I have noted someone say "if you check the box". I have searched my PPS many times for the Site Trunking box and just don't see it. I have looked through every section carefully. Would someone mind pointing me in the right direction. Using 0.3.5 Beta1 with my G4.
Thanks

 

[David_Oney]

Site trunking is when a site become isolated from the trunking system. Awhile ago the engineers made site trunking ALWAYS ON and therefore made that checkbox obsolete so it will be removed in a future release The behavior of the G4/G5 is when it receives a site trunking signal it looks for an adjacent site that is not reporting site trunking and if it finds one it locks on to it. If it does not find a site it will display a red banner that says SITE TRUNKING and the unit will monitor the traffic on that site.

 

[cpetraglia]

Thank you. I am not nuts after all.

 

[APX8000]

When Fort Lauderdale's system was in testing mode the "site trunking" in red appeared on the G5. Once they connected to Broward's core, it went away. So what Dave said.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ffexpCP]

Here's what it looks like.

 

[ffexpCP]

If you look at the picture, the typical 'T' shown with the signal bars changes to a 'S'

 

[doctordave]

Very interesting. Thanks for all the responses.

 

[wa8pyr]

In a perfect world you'd be able to choose whether or not your radio stays on a site that is in site trunking so you won't miss any calls/pages/whatever that may come from a wireline console or from other units on a wide-area site.

I'd imagine that was the intent of this checkbox, but I don't know.

Ditto, that's my thought. Commercial radios naturally want to be in wide area mode, so if a site goes into Site Trunking the radio will start looking for a site that isn't and lock onto it instead. My guess would be the checkbox in the Unication tells the scanner to ignore a site that's in site trunking.