UNIDEN TETRA

Would you pay for Tetra?

  • Yes

    Votes: 64 60.4%
  • No

    Votes: 42 39.6%

  • Total voters
    106
  • Poll closed .
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wbswetnam

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Some appear to believe that Uniden is a public service, whose responsibility it is to appease the demands of radio scanner aficionados.

This simply is not the case. Uniden is a publicly traded company whose goal it is to make money. Research and development are not free; they require significant money and time. Ergo, they allocate their resources toward engineering and marketing products which they believe will turn significant profits for the company and their investors. I'm certain that Uniden has made efforts to determine what their possible profits could be from developing, marketing, supporting and paying licensing fees for TETRA. If they had determined that it would be in the company's best interests to do so, they'd have done it by now. As with (practically) all things in this world, it comes down to money, and if they think they can't turn a profit on a product, they're not going to do it.
 

buddrousa

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I thank Mike for setting up the pole it is hard to answer as I have no need for TETRA just like I have no need for PROVOICE so I will not vote yes but if I needed them then the answer would be yes. I say this because I have bought 40 DMR NXDN License combined for the Uniden Scanners I own and use each and every day. That is a total of over $2,000.00 in fees so if I have a need I would buy.
 

werinshades

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I thank Mike for setting up the pole it is hard to answer as I have no need for TETRA just like I have no need for PROVOICE so I will not vote yes but if I needed them then the answer would be yes. I say this because I have bought 40 DMR NXDN License combined for the Uniden Scanners I own and use each and every day. That is a total of over $2,000.00 in fees so if I have a need I would buy.

If...and a big If this was offered at a discounted introductory price, ($30? for the first 14 days?), it might be worth it to have in the event someone close by decides to go that route. The O'Hare airport system I mentioned isn't up and running yet and will be low power, and of course I don't know if encryption is being considered.
 

maus92

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TETRA is frequency inefficient for wide area, multi site systems, so its adoption in the US would be limited. Scanning receivers are for the most part, a US market. Plus it present a reversal in interoperability. But I can see a user group developing software for SDR hardware.
 

W2MB

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I've added a poll to this thread which asks if you would be willing to pay for a Tetra upgrade.

The thing to consider is any upgrade would probably cost about the same as the NXDN or DMR upgrades.

For me, the answer is no since I don't have any Tetra systems near me.

New Jersey Transit uses Tetra. If the SDS100 was to become capable of hearing them, I'd upgrade to it from my BCD436
 

buddrousa

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One thing to remember Paul made this statement.
The 996P2 almost all of the available firmware memory was used to add DMR and NXDN not much space left.
He never stated anything about how much room was left in the x36's firmware memory we can only guess how much room is left.
We can think that the SDSx00 were built with more room but until we are told by Uniden we have no way to know but we were told by Paul that the SDSx00's had more to come.
 

werinshades

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It wouldn't just be the technology but who would be using it. If a Statewide system including PD, FD, & EMS were to use TETRA, there would be much more interest than if a power company covering the same area did. With P25 being the main player for public safety systems and then FirstNet possibilities, I really don't see much promise for TETRA having widespread use in the US (and thus not much demand from US scanner consumers).

chris

Once again, I'll digress back to when MotoTRBO/NXDN systems were being discussed as an add-on. "Who would want to listen to businesses and school bus companies etc..". The same could be said about TETRA. We do...
 

pyeman99

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Once again, I'll digress back to when MotoTRBO/NXDN systems were being discussed as an add-on. "Who would want to listen to businesses and school bus companies etc..". The same could be said about TETRA. We do...
The only difference with TETRA, much is likely to be encrypted & listening to TETRA in general is not in the interests of the big M.
 

wbswetnam

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Besides in the USA, Mexico's IRIS nationwide radio system uses TETRA, but it is fully encrypted and its communications are in Spanish anyway. I don't think that TETRA is used at all in Canada, I may be wrong.
 

GTR8000

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There are currently a total of 47 TETRA systems in the RRDB. 11 are in North America.

Yes, we all fully comprehend that "there is a world beyond North America". The point, however, is that the majority of scanners manufactured by both Uniden and Whistler are sold in North America. As previously stated, that means that the manufacturers are going to cater to the wants and needs of their largest consumer base, and so far TETRA has not been at the top of that list. It really is that simple. ;)

USA: 8
ARINC - Los Angeles International Airport
ARINC (JFK)
Cobb EMC TETRA
Collins Aerospace (Newark International Airport)
Diverse Power TETRA
Flint Hills Resources Pine Bend Refinery
New Jersey Transit
Rockwell Collins-ARINC

Canada: 2
BC Hydro
Toronto Transit Commission PowerTrunk

Mexico: 1
IRIS Nationwide Public Safety Network
 

KevinC

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Besides in the USA, Mexico's IRIS nationwide radio system uses TETRA, but it is fully encrypted and its communications are in Spanish anyway. I don't think that TETRA is used at all in Canada, I may be wrong.

As most people in Mexico speak Spanish that probably wouldn't be an issue for them...not unless TETRA has different vocoders for each language. :p
 

Ubbe

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The vocoders have developed a lot since the beginning av the tetra era. At first it was only english spoken women that had good audio and deep male voices and many other languages where terrible. The audio are not transported lossless in the system and it is stripped of many bits when it is converted from analog to digital to save capacity in the radio interface. There are no information at the decoder end of the vocoder that can guide the process in what bits have been stripped, like it is in zip and rar compressed files. It's a guessing game based on algoritms, that has been improved on over the years, so today it actually sounds almost perfect in most languages and genders (chinese are rumored to still be problematic) and often much better than DMR.

/Ubbe
 

LAflyer

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I would certainly pay for it.
At my home airport, ever more airlines and service providers have signed up for the ARINC Tetra system for their ground staff.
I've heard City of Los Angeles is even exploring its use at the airport for non public safety users.
 

RK3BV

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One thing to remember Paul made this statement.
The 996P2 almost all of the available firmware memory was used to add DMR and NXDN not much space left.
He never stated anything about how much room was left in the x36's firmware memory we can only guess how much room is left.
We can think that the SDSx00 were built with more room but until we are told by Uniden we have no way to know but we were told by Paul that the SDSx00's had more to come.

You can recommend that you select the functional set for the existing memory by the user: for example, BIN / FIRM: P25, DMR, NXDN, Tetra, and others separately, because the activation keys are tied to ESN. Paste and reload no problem. Lay out a library of function selection. This eliminates the possibility of replacing memory during production and, as a result, dividing ESN numbers on hands by added and not added by Tetra, for example: on AOR DV1 - two upgrades before and after a certain number.
 
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