Two Tone Decode Issue G5/VHF

[wa2chj]

I discovered a possible issue with my G5 7/800 & VHF pager.

First, a little background.

1. Pager. I have had it about six months. It is updated to the latest firmware, and has been working perfectly. It is set up to alert on our tones and reset with a Delay N of 15 seconds. It is also set up to record alerted calls.
2. System. It is the 7/800 trunking system used by Union County, NC and is part of the Charlotte, NC UASI System. It is a trunking and VHF simulcast system, and the trunking Dispatch Talk Group simulcasts what is on the VHF dispatch channel. The VHF conventional channel is used almost exclusively for paging of the Minitor and Swissphone pagers, and only the tones and dispatch info goes over this channel. Then everyone is switched to the appropriate Ops channel on our XTS2500 7/800 portables. The tones also go over the 7/800 system, and I have no problem decoding and alerting on EITHER the 7/800 or the VHF talk group/channel. The Dispatch Talk Group is the first in the G5 priority list, and therefore is the highest priority during Priority Scan.
3. Department. We have three separate stations in our department. Only ONE set of tones is used to alert our department. ALL THREE stations alert on the same two tone pair. My pager has worked fine on both the VHF and 7/800 systems, and they are on different knob positions as they cannot be on the same position.
4. Conditions at the time of the issue. G5 was on monitor priority scan. It was scanning on the 7/800 system scanning Dispatch and our Ops talk groups. It was working fine. This is how I usually have it running, and it had already alerted, and recorded a couple of calls in the last couple hours. In the next room was a Minitor VI set to open monitor on our VHF Dispatch channel, and it, also, had already alerted and recorded the previous calls.
5. What happened. We had two calls come in at the same time. The first call was toned out, and both the G5 and M6 alerted and recorded Dispatch info correctly. The G5 showed the normal 15 second count down and remained recording until the dispatch info dropped.
   Dispatch immediately sent the second set of alert tones. Here’s where the issue came up. The M6 alerted again (it also has a reset Delay N of 15 seconds), and recorded the second call. The G5 played the tones over the G5 speaker, but did not alert. The 15 second timer did not reset or display, and it did not record the call. No other Talk Groups were active at the time.
   Granted, this is an unusual set of circumstances, and is unlikely to occur very often, but it is potentially a disaster waiting to happen. If the M6 wasn’t on, and everyone was away from the G5, when we came back and played the recorded messages, we would never have known about the second call.
   I just thought everyone, including Unication, should know about this issue and the potential problem it could cause.

Scott
EMT-P-CC, FP, ERT
WA2CHJ

 

[KB4SHP]

Hey Scott I would contact your dealer and they will probably put you in contact with someone with unication reason I say this when we got our G1s we had a problem with them not alerting in the amp charger

 

[wa2chj]

Hey Scott I would contact your dealer and they will probably put you in contact with someone with unication reason I say this when we got our G1s we had a problem with them not alerting in the amp charger

I originally got it from Ray's Pagers, and he's pretty good about monitoring this forum, so I figured he would see it and reply.
If he doesn't in a couple days, I will definitely take your suggestion and email it directly to him. I just figured I'd kill two birds with one stone...making everyone aware of this issue and Ray/Unication seeing it as well.
Also, just FYI, I have the non-amplified drop in charger, and whether or not the pager is in it, it normally alerts just fine. At the time this issue happened, it was not in the charger. I'm sure it's some kind of timing thing, or the pager was just confused by the double alert.

Scott