Wagga + P25

[citabria]

and it's analog, right?


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[Longreach]

Hi all, Yep analog with a sub tone of 241.8hz

163.425 Mt Selwyn

163.6125 Mt Perisher

163.700 Crackenback (Thredbo)

163.750 Mt Youngal

163.775 Ingebirah Trig

163.8875 Eucumbene lookout

163.9625 Wambrook Trig

Roughly covers the same area as the Channel 36 vote covers although ive picked up the Mt Perisher channel all the way over at Steeple Flat (Brown Mtn) on a PSR800 and H/H radio antenna in car.

Cheers
Matt

[Bigfella237]

Not sure if it has anything to do with the upgrade to digital but yesterday morning there were a heap of clicking sounds that VKG said were emanating "from the Bega channel" that were apparently causing widespread disruption.

This went on for several hours and then we lost the link to VKG altogether on the Batemans Bay vote and they still haven't come back on twelve hours later! At the moment dispatch is being done via Bay station.

Andrew

[Farsouthscanner]

Yeah they had trouble with the channel down here. I assume it was the wind that caused a link up north to go down.
It hasn't happened for a while. Going back a couple of years it was a fairly common thing.

[Bigfella237]

I've been monitoring these new P25 vote groups in my area and I've noticed some interesting things happening...

I'm monitoring four different vote groups (all part of channel sierra) with four scanners and four instances of ID Tracker III, but I'm also listening to a couple of the votes with Motorola radios as well (programmed for receive-only of course).

The reason I started listening with actual P25 radios is that I suspected the IMBE Vocoder that Uniden is using was doing some strange things (I read somewhere that they don't use a licenced DVSI vocoder like Motorola do), like not decoding the "priority" tones sent by the consoles properly (they come over the scanner sounding like somebody whistling down a chimney), then I discovered the Motorola gear isn't decoding the tones properly either (but then I'm not running the latest DSP so that might be a contributing factor), I'd be interested to hear what they sound like on the PF radios?

Another thing I've noticed is that with both the radio & scanner on the same vote group and running off the same frequency, the scanner has a noticeable delay in decoding the voice (I'm not sure how you'd measure this but I'd guess it might be 100ms), this might be something in the way Uniden is processing the P25 data, or maybe it's down to processor power itself, either way it doesn't effect what you hear and you'd probably never notice it normally?

But perhaps the biggest thing I've found is with the way they're patching traffic to each vote group. It appears the subscribers are all transmitting on talkgroup 0x0001 whereas the consoles are all TXing on TG 0xFFFF, I assume this has something to do with the half-duplex setup where the console operators need to be able to hear incoming traffic even if they're transmitting themselves, although GRN consoles seem to cope without using different TGs so maybe I have the theory wrong?

Anyway, for some reason the console isn't repeating all the traffic to all the vote groups all the time, every now and then, maybe one call in a couple of hundred, one of the vote groups won't carry the traffic that the rest of the channel is? At first I thought it was the scanner not picking up the talkgroup info but then I saw it happen on the Moto radio as well, but if you weren't listening to multiple votes at the same time you'd never know what you were missing, there must be a bug in the system somewhere?

Beside all that, I'm not all that impressed with the voice quality so far (and it seems I'm not the only one judging by the number of "please repeats"), I'm not sure if it's because there's still an analog link in there somewhere (half the Far South LAC is still analog) but even traffic coming out of the (all digital) Shoalhaven isn't all that clear. Certainly not a patch on the GRN, I remember when it first went P25 it made me jump out of my skin quite a few times thinking there was someone else in the room!

Andrew

[Longreach]

Hi all, Andrew, I see the same here all cars are transmitting on TG 1 and the console are on 65535. Thats how is is round here on my local vote and two neighboring votes. However the rest of W all cars and the consoles transmit on TG 1 and the RID's show up no matter what vote there on(can see RID's from a completely different vote). Round here though i just see 5 a lot.
Cheers
Matt

[Bigfella237]

G'day Matt,

For patched traffic I'm seeing UID "1" on three of the four vote groups I'm monitoring, with the other one showing a UID of "5", I'm not sure if I was seeing things but I swear I saw a UID of "3" flash up briefly too, although ID Tracker didn't log it?

Channel sierra down here was patched into channel uniform today for a while, it was weird hearing cars from WAY out west on the south coast channel, the day before we were patched into whiskey for a while too and then romeo out of Wollongong, which was interesting...

Andrew

[Farsouthscanner]

I agree Andrew the audio quality isn't as good as the GRN.
At first I thought that it was just because I have been used to listening to analogue for the past 12 or so years but after listening to the digital channels for a while I still don't think its as clear as the GRN. Its not bad but listening to the two of them at the same time you can tell the difference.
Mark

[cartman]

Three more frequencies have popped up on the ACMA for the SW slopes between the Snowies and Albury along the NSW-VIC border, with a common input 459.0125

468.1375 Tumbarumba
468.5125 Jingellic
468.8375 Mt Youngal

[matthewn1983]

From memory, all that area was still analog a few months back, but the surrounding area was all P25