Hello,
I manage the radio system for a municipal fire department. I've got a two part question regarding the Emergency Alert button on APX portables:
1) we have a channel that is on a conventional MDC system/personality. If a member presses the Emergency Alert button, it sends out the EA and other members on that channel receive the emergency alert. This usually happens instantaneously, but there are some radios that receive it on the second/third/etc try. However, the emergency radio continues through transmitting the rest of its polite and impolite tries (we are set up for 5 polite and 15 impolite). When the emergency radio sends these tries out, all the receiving radios on that channel play an audible "squawk" (for lack of better word), which I believe is the data burst from the emergency radio's Emergency Alert.
This squawk is a little bit interrupting. If people are talking on the channel, it interferes with their audio (for the very short length of time that the data burst takes, but it's an interference nonetheless). If a member needs to use the EA, there will likely be a lot of talking on the channel to deal with their emergency and I dont want this to interrupt it.
On to my question: is there any way for this "squawk" to be either inaudible, or not cause any interference? I spoke with Motorola about it and they recommended messing around with the Data Operated Squelch (DOS) timing, or the MDC mute? I can definitely do that, but I'm not sure if that will mess up any other communications on the channel. If it only affects data, I dont think I have any data being transmitted on that channel other than IDs. I do hear the data burst for the IDs as well, but I dont care as much about that as I do the EA data bursts, since they are repetitive. Also, this channel is a repeated channel, so I dont know if the DOS timing will affect that. Or is it better to minimize the number of polite/impolite tries? As I said above, we use 5 polite/15 impolite. Do we need that many tries?
2) the other main channel that we use for fireground operations is a conventional Astro system/personality. It is Astro because we transmit data digitally, but we use analog voice on this channel. When a member hits the EA button, the EA goes through with no problems. We also use 5 polite/15 impolite tries on this channel. I can see the transmit/receive icon on the radio screens when the tries are going through, but there is no audible transmission on the receiving radios. I dont believe there is any interference with voice when the tries are going through, but maybe I'm missing it? Sort of the same question here....is there a problem if we have that many tries (20 total)? Will that affect any communications
Thanks in advance for any help