Unication G5 slow trunk tracking

[BladeVortex]

I'm trying to give my department's other members the nice capabilities I've set up on my pager, but for some reason, their pagers track trunking much slower than mine. This is a problem because I'm doing 2-tone over P25, and with this much of a delay, it will most likely miss the first tone. I updated their firmware and converted my pager's profile to work on theirs. This happens regardless of voice buffering on or not. Their pagers were bought before late 2023, and mine was bought in late 2025. Any ideas?

 

[w2lie]

1. Are you using the latest firmware on both pagers?
2. How large is the scan list? The smaller the better.
3. Are they monitoring the same site?

 

[K9KLC]

I don't know how much this matters or if I'm seeing this incorrectly but, are they the same model pagers? One looks like a G5 and the other a G2? Maybe my old eyes are playing tricks on me.

 

[K9KLC]

1. Are you using the latest firmware on both pagers?
2. How large is the scan list? The smaller the better.
3. Are they monitoring the same site?

And both programmed exactly the same?

 

[BladeVortex]

I don't know how much this matters or if I'm seeing this incorrectly but, are they the same model pagers? One looks like a G5 and the other a G2? Maybe my old eyes are playing tricks on me.

Yes mine is the G2 and it tracks to the transmission instantly, but there's about a 1 second delay before the G5 tracks. This is enough to miss the first tone in Quick Call II, and sometimes it misses up to 3 seconds of transmission. Today I'm going to backup everything on it and factory reset it.

 

[BladeVortex]

1. Are you using the latest firmware on both pagers?
2. How large is the scan list? The smaller the better.
3. Are they monitoring the same site?

1. The G5 is on v2.02 and the G2 is on v2.03. I can't find v2.03 updating software, so I could only update the G5 to v2.02. The G2 came from the factory with v2.03.

2. In that video they're on a knob position with all 64 TGIDs chosen. They're also on trunking monitor mode, so all traffic should play. I only did that for the video as there isn't much radio traffic in my area. When I go down to a trunking scan list with only 1 talkgroup, it's still slow to track. Last night the G5 missed a QCII that my G2 caught. In fact the G5 has yet to successfully detect QCII.

3. I figure both are on the same site because there's only 1.

 

[BladeVortex]

An update on what I've done so far:

I factory reset the pager and cleared all user data. Then I flashed the firmware again. Then I factory reset and cleared user data again. Then I programmed it with a very basic test profile that only had 1 zone and 1 knob position scanning 1 talkgroup with no subgroups, and it was still tracking very slowly. I noticed its even slow to change between the knob positions on the factory default programming, so I think that's just how this pager is.

I turned on voice buffering, and I can't tell if it's helping recover those missing words from the beginning of a transmission, but I noticed it has another effect that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere except here kind of. I thought voice buffering just simply delayed the voice for a second, but with voice buffering enabled, if one talkgroup is being played live and another is talking at the same time and being missed, it will sometimes store that entire missed transmission and play it once the first transmission is over. It's very hit or miss. I honestly don't know how this is possible because TDMA isn't a thing on my network and I don't think the G series pagers can tune to multiple frequencies at the same time. Hopefully I'll get it on camera, but I've seen it twice now start playing audio from a transmission that was entirely missed and already finished.

 

[tglendye]

So, Voice Buffering was off initially? My first guess was it was turned on and that was causing your issues. It sounds strange how it’s behaving after your turned it on.

 

[BladeVortex]

So, Voice Buffering was off initially? My first guess was it was turned on and that was causing your issues. It sounds strange how it’s behaving after your turned it on.

I was gonna post an update tomorrow when the results were more conclusive but I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. I'm mainly making this update to save some poor sap on Google the days of testing different configurations and waiting for tones to drop to see if something worked.

The pager is internally tracking and decoding before it plays the audio out loud. It's also detecting tones successfully before it starts playing audio.

I've now seen it three times detect QCII tones and activate before it even has a chance to start playing the audio out loud. It hasn't missed a single call in about a week. I'm currently stress testing it with the dispatch channel on priority and 63 other talkgroups in non-priority, and it appears to be working just fine still.

This is all with voice buffering on. I'm giving him back his pager soon so I'm just going to give him what I know works on his pager. Since his pager is laggy I'm keeping voice buffering on for him. On my own I have voice buffering off because it tracks trunking instantly, and I haven't missed a call in the month I've had it set up this way.

 

[jeepsandradios]

Just as reference when using it as a pager you want the least amount of stuff on that channel/button/setting. If you need CFC7 and pager tones for one station thats all you want in the setup. Dont have other talkgroups in there. When in monitor scan be aware you can miss pages. Thats why all the counties still operate analog paging and support it.

 

[2wayfreq]

Has putting the closest area site control channels at the top of the CC List made any difference?

 

[BladeVortex]

Has putting the closest area site control channels at the top of the CC List made any difference?

Just now I tried removing all but the single control channel frequency that we use in this county and somehow now it's actually tracking slower.

 

[BladeVortex]

Just as reference when using it as a pager you want the least amount of stuff on that channel/button/setting. If you need CFC7 and pager tones for one station thats all you want in the setup. Dont have other talkgroups in there. When in monitor scan be aware you can miss pages. Thats why all the counties still operate analog paging and support it.

You'd be surprised! I've had the pager in Trunking Monitor mode with fire dispatch as the only priority talkgroup, and it caught all 4 of my calls today. I was trying to make this reply a couple hours ago and it actually did the voice buffering thing again, I watched as my pager went off while his pager was playing another county's fire dispatch, then his pager went off about 10 seconds later. My pager was only monitoring our dispatch and voice buffering was off, so it was pretty much live. I'd like to get it on video but we average a bit less than a call per day.

 

[jeepsandradios]

As said if yo uonly have one alkgroup it will work fine, its when you start scanning a dozen talkgroups that you will miss calls.

 

[BladeVortex]

As said if yo uonly have one alkgroup it will work fine, its when you start scanning a dozen talkgroups that you will miss calls.

To be clear, in Trunking Monitor mode it will scan every talkgroup even if it's not on the scan list. I don't know if I'm just getting lucky but he's left the pager with me for another 2 weeks while he goes on vacation so I have plenty of time to try stuff out. If I see it do another 2-tone detection while playing another talkgroup, I'm going to try turning off voice buffering, then later I'll try not having dispatch as a priority talkgroup, and then if that still doesn't make it miss calls, I'll turn off both.

 

[BladeVortex]

Ok final update hopefully:
With voice buffering off, it finally started missing calls. With dispatch not being a priority channel, it also missed 1 call, a lot were still caught because of the buffering. I'm not going to test with them both off, it will obviously miss a lot of calls.