With new systems, there are usually horror stories. Our county is essentially an ancient lake bottom and is very flat. We will be adding a 5th and possibly a 6th tower to support areas of poor coverage. I consider this a flaw in the original system design for this area. There have also been "dead-spots" with the traditional FM systems.
One of our county's township's firefighter told me that they always switch to analog when arriving at an incident. Their lack of confidence relates in part to a structure fire when they heard a firefighter inside screaming for help to dispatch. Dispatch didn't respond until later when dispatch saw that the emergency button was triggered. Obviously, his transmission was going through the system and it was probably a surge issue at dispatch. Our county has a population of approximately 164,000 with three dispatchers for police, fire, and EMS. The emergency button flashes on all of their screens and also appears at the state-wide site. Our county APCO P25 trainer mentions that local acoustical noise makes the transmission difficult to understand and to be sure to hold the microphone 2 to 5 cm away from the mouth. He discourages the practice of using the microphone at arm's length. He also discourages the practice of "clicking" the PTT for an acknowledgment, as there is no squelch tail. I particularly enjoy the inter-operability and the instant display of the transmitting station's identification. I occasionally hear garbled voices during a transmission from a person in an area of poor coverage. We have not seen a large enough event to consume all of our talk-paths yet. Each of our towers has at least two different microwave paths. Our county is about 70 Kilometers in the longest direction. The Michigan State Police project is quite an ambitious system in area covered. About 250,000 square km and 10,000,000 population. Gareth Bennett (Ihug) wrote: > > > Hello Group, > > As P25 is being rolled out worldwide, I have been hearing many stories > regarding P25 shortcomings. ..Such as Vocoder problems in high noise > situations, "Jitter" and "Multipath" issues from users that have > converted from their legacy Analog systems, etc . The repeater issues > (If any) are especially interesting for me, and would be very interested > in hearing feedback from my colleagues from around the globe. > > Best regards to all > > Gareth Bennett > >
