problems with Channel Whiskey

[Longreach]

Hi all, noticed tonight on the way home from canberra listening to ch w that none of the cars outside the Goulburn LAC can be heard. the operator can be heard and Goulburn LAC cars can be but nothing else. Goulburn LAC cars in the Digital area cant be heard either. wonder what the story is?
I monitored Z1ch07, Z1ch19, Z1ch51 and VHF 39. all with same result
cheers

[matthewn1983]

Another problem u hear quite offen on that channel is when a car calls, and then the signal locks so to speak with some awful feedback sound, takes them a good 5 minutes to try and resolve the problem. Just wipes the channel out with a constant transmission of something that sounds like data or very bad feedback..

[Bigfella237]

... something that sounds like data or very bad feedback..

The best description I've heard offered up so far is someone dragging a length of gal pipe across concrete!

The southern area ambo's channel is the worst for doing it lately, almost always late on a warm night, I would suspect it has something to do with ducting?

Andrew

[Longreach]

there both pretty good for it lately. im finding when its wet or been wet is when that awful noise occurs. when it does occur listening on the digital is probably the least painful to hear it.
lately i feel there just putting a bandaid on bandaid to try holding it together. you constantly hear radio techs on the channel, the delays on the voip's are way tooooo long and hence you miss the first part of the callsign, just listen to channel X or eso 10 to see what i mean. it seems worse since VKG1 took the channel over.
i could go on but generally im discusted with the problems on the channel and i feel it will probably take an officer down or worse dead before they get off there backsides and fix it all properly.

[ivahri]

From what I have heard a lot of the problems are due to links being daisy chained in order to get the signal from the original destination (ie Wagga) to wherever it now goes.

It is too easy to point the finger at "RoiP" for these problems when in fact the RoIP works very well, just that the system has been cobbled together in such a way that has introduced delays (whether RoIP is used or not). Ditto for the sometimes awful audio heard on the Police PMR... I can tell you the reason, and it has nothing to do with P25, but again it comes down to poor backroom & link design done because (a) design was rushed and (b) design was compromised to save $. RoIP actually works extremely well- done properly.

Its a new world & many of us are learning fast about how systems need to be properly designed in P25 or RoIP. My employer is extremely conservative & it is paranoid about implementing anything without thorough testing.

Cheers,


Richard

[centralcoastscanman]

agree with your comments there Richard fully, and i'm not even looking at them from a roip aspect i'm just talking about voip generally..

[Longreach]

like i said richard it will take an officer with his/her life in danger or worse before they do something about it. im no radio tech but just from monitoring its a very woeful system and i thought that peoples lives were worth a bit more than that. the fact that techs are pretty much on the channel everyday would suggest theres problems, heard one around 7pm tonight doing checks.

[ivahri]

agree with your comments there Richard fully, and i'm not even looking at them from a roip aspect i'm just talking about voip generally..

I understand where you are coming from- the perception of most people is what they hear from consumer grade voip. Pretty hideous & I wouldn't use it myself, I'll stick to the old fashioned telephone! But even though voip & roip are essentially the same thing it is the grade of service, particularly bandwidth, jitter and latency, that is very different. I know one agency (not an emergency service) using roip via NextG to link repeaters- absolutely hideous audio with lost packets etc... Cheap and nasty. On the other hand you can set up a high grade, secure BDSL/GBIP network with 64k uncompressed audio, latency better than 50msec, and guaranteed quality of service. It costs, but it is far far higher quality than the old copper lines- and from what I've been told Police still are running on copper lines down the south-west (my info is a few months old so they may have made progress).

Hopefully the uniformed officers are screaming loudly about the situation. It sounds like the techs need some help.

Cheers,

Richard

[centralcoastscanman]

it won't matter if the uniformed officers complain, its when the police association gets stuck into the nswp hi-erachy that things will change.

I've used both consumer grade voip/aka piece of crap, and proper voip setup by a professional company with qos and its not hard to notice the difference...

[Longreach]

yep they complain, the techs come out do a few checks reboot it all good then a day or 2 later back again.
dunno the answer just hope they do something soon. its getting way beyond a joke.
cheers