You don't say where you are but I'm going to assume Orillia?
The digital coverage is so spotty that they require an Analog beet repeater just to maintain comms with the Com center.
The Fleetnet system was never designed to support portables. In Orillia and other towns where the OPP do foot patrols, they've installed BEAT repeaters (they call it the URBAN repeater in Orillia) to support the foot patrols. Since the regular officers only carry analog portables, there's no way they could use digital anyways.
The only ones that do are the ERT and Drug units.
ERT units do not have encryption as they are regular patrol units that have some specialized training. You're confusing them with the TRU team units who are dedicated to TRU work. You've also left out a whole pile of other units which have encryption: Crime, K9, Intelligence, TSB, VIP, etc, etc.
They use voice inversion and they complain on a daily basis that’s it doesn’t work in the remote areas (mountain or rural areas).
I wasn't aware that we've got any mountain ranges in Ontario and they definitely don't use speech inversion. There's no encryption on the analog channels at all and the digital talkgroups and conventional channels use DES-OFB encryption.
The portables that they carry are only good within 200 FT of the cruisers repeater in digital mode.
Yes, the system is designed that way so units in close proximity don't interfere with each other. The portables and repeaters are also analog only, no digital.
There just isn’t enough tower coverage based on where the dispatch (Orillia) tower is located. As it stand there at times is an 8 to 10 second delay between the beat repeater and the digital coverage. Most just wish they would have stayed with analog.
I listen to the URBAN repeater in Orillia on a regular basis and the most delay I've ever heard is 1 second and it seems to cover the Orillia downtown area fairly well. Where they do run into problems is when a mobile unit tries to use his portable in his vehicle while outside of the downtown area.
