If they're on a trunked system and not already paging over a conventional system, many agencies will have a dedicated talkgroup for each station in case the IP systems goes out.
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what replaced QCII in modern radios?
- Thread starter rjvalenta
- Start date
If they're on a trunked system and not already paging over a conventional system, many agencies will have a dedicated talkgroup for each station in case the IP systems goes out.
MTS2000des
5B2_BEE00 Czar
You get the obvious improvements that come with system that is not RF exclusive. Nothing worse than getting a phonecall from the dispatch center at 0345 on a wednesday that they don't think the paging system is working. IP based systems have the advantage of being HA systems that are usually self-diagnosing/reporting in nature and can get you frequently 4 x 9s or even 5 x 9s with other systems also being supported redundantly.
An IP link drops and cameras fail, systems lose sync, alarms go into trouble, and you usually have instantaneous awareness of a loss. Reporting systems report to who they need to , and frequently the techs are dispatched via that. A simulcast RF paging system drops a link to a transmit site, and all of a sudden great-grand Peepaw Herbert can't get the fire police vehicle out for the Big One™ and no one knew it until the unit scratches a dispatch....or in some cases, you go weeks without knowing an entire area is getting neighboring site coverage at 20% reliability because the geographical primary site has been down.
An IP link drops and cameras fail, systems lose sync, alarms go into trouble, and you usually have instantaneous awareness of a loss. Reporting systems report to who they need to , and frequently the techs are dispatched via that. A simulcast RF paging system drops a link to a transmit site, and all of a sudden great-grand Peepaw Herbert can't get the fire police vehicle out for the Big One™ and no one knew it until the unit scratches a dispatch....or in some cases, you go weeks without knowing an entire area is getting neighboring site coverage at 20% reliability because the geographical primary site has been down.
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MTS2000des
5B2_BEE00 Czar
I get instant notification of failures from MachAlert. Dispatchers get an instant N_ACK and alarm at their MCC7500 if an alert fails. ComStats in Mach Alert's admin application show historical performance of both IP WAN and IV&D packet behavior. Each station has battery backup and generator backup of their alerting hardware. I'd much prefer this system over our old "tone drop" of generating DTMF/QCIIs on a voice talkgroup and hoping it tripped a relay in a control station to sound a buzzer and unmute the audio.
not to mention air time you're not tying up.
20 seconds of tones (2 stacked calls on a local system) * 10 calls/day * 365 = 20.277 hrs of tones.
It's not the 1970s any more, move on.
dispatchgeek
Control channel goes "brrrrr"
Agency I work for is still primarily QCII with CAD integrated digital voice alerts in the full time stations. We have some response plans for low volume “mega calls” that would result in 60-90 seconds worth of tone before we even get to voicing the incident details.
QCII is slow in today’s environment. Think back to the TV show emergency when more than a couple stations responded. It was just a wall of QCI (not QCII) tones.
Apps like Active911 help speed up this process in our more rural areas. It is important though to think of cell based alerting as a secondary tool as proved yet again by the recent AT&T/FirstNet outage.
