scanSydney

I borrowed this from another forum. I am not the author, just passing it on. But it does make for an interesting ratio, and I wonder it is replicated here.

The Question:
By any chance does anybody happen to know what percentage of digital radios in the US are MOTOTRBO? And maybe that is a very difficult questions to answer, because although public safety has gone APCO P25 in my area, other areas are using MOTOTRBO or NXDN. I am just curious, since a deadline is on the horizon, I wonder if your average hospital or campus security department is staying analog, but going to narrow bandwidth radios, going MOTO TRBO, NXDN, or something else. From my perspective, it seems like most of the places I am familiar with have gone MOTOTRBO.

The Answer:
I only have antidotal evidence here, but we are seeing about 80 to 90% is MOTOTRBO when a repeater in involved. When there is no repeater involved, we are seeing about 60 to 70% MOTOTRBO. We have very active Kenwood and ICOM dealers in our area, but the features on MOTOTRBO and product quality is night and day difference between Motorola and the others.

R

Bring on that NXDN/MOTOTRBO scanner Uniden!!

Mike

"6.25e" (6.25KHz equivalency, or 1 talk path per 6.25KHz of spectrum) is "strongly encouraged" right now, and will be the end of analogue FM on the land mobile bands in the United States when it eventually becomes mandatory.

SKEYGEN wrote:"6.25e" (6.25KHz equivalency, or 1 talk path per 6.25KHz of spectrum) is "strongly encouraged" right now, and will be the end of analogue FM on the land mobile bands in the United States when it eventually becomes mandatory.

I don't think mandatory 6.25KHz will come in anytime soon in the US. Took nearly 15 years to get a date of 2013 for mandatory 12.5KHz. Analogue FM will still be around for a while yet.

Either way I certainly hope that Uniden and other manufacturers are looking at implementing those standards!

By my reckoning the following companies/brands are TRBO (TDMA) while the others are NXDN/IDAS (FDMA).

TRBO: Motorola, Hytera, Vertex, Harris, Simoco, Kirisun, Selex, Tait (seemingly have an each way bet)

NXDN: Icom, Kenwood, Tait, Ritron

Yet to commit / not interested: Johnson

No doubt there are others. So it will be interesting to see who will win, VHS or BETA - sorry that was a different battle.

R

rustynswrail wrote:So it will be interesting to see who will win, VHS or BETA - sorry that was a different battle.

R

Got a good laugh out of me!

BETA had better quality and all the TV netowrks used it

Longreach wrote:BETA had better quality and all the TV networks used it

Without getting too off topic. The main difference (amongst others) was the way the tape was presented to the heads, less pressure points with Beta (one instead of three for VHS. TV used Betacam which ran at, I think, 6 times the speed of the domestic Betacord/Betamax.

So it is the same argument between NXDN and TRBO, which is better FDMA or TDMA? I would have thought TDMA as you can have more time slots than frequency divisions, therefore potentially more TDMA users. I suppose it is going to be more about marketing than technical capabilities, just like the VHS/Beta fight. Personally I think TRBO is the better system.

R

This is the thing, TDMA and FDMA are actually apples and oranges...

Phase 2 P25 uses both FMDA and TDMA. TRBO uses both FDMA and TDMA..

Marketing people are to blame for this little mess