'Digital' radios on CSX?

I don't know if these radios actually include GPS

Have you looked over the specs from the link I provided?

FWIW; they have already started to issue these radios to the crews. You have to turn in your old Motorola radio first. The Icon hand helds are narrowband capable already, so those aren't involved.

clearblock wrote:Fire departments have encountered serious problems with digital radios in fireground operations. The problem is that digital voice encoder circuits can't deal with loud background noise. A firefighter wearing an air-pac and in the noise of a fire scene sounds awful but can be understood with an analog radio. A digital radio produces only unintelligible noise under the same conditions.

OK, I'm confused now. I was under the impression that we were talking DIGITAL transmission, not digital voice encryption. Our county uses the digital PL transmission, and we do not have any problems with background noise. My dept. isn't using the intergrated mask mics yet. We still use portable radios which you would think pick up even more BG noise since they aren't shielded by the mask. If the RRs are going digital voice encryption, all bets are off on a scanner picking it up. All you will hear will sound like alien noises.

videobruce wrote:FWIW; they have already started to issue these radios to the crews. You have to turn in your old Motorola radio first. The Icon hand helds are narrowband capable already, so those aren't involved.

My someone knows someone else that definately has one of the new radios and could ask them to key up on a road channel to see what it sounds like on a scanner?

On the list of things to do.
Anyway, AAR channel 46 is the same frequency wide or narrow band. It would be how the receiver could/would handle the narrow band transmission.

EMTRailfan wrote:OK, I'm confused now. I was under the impression that we were talking DIGITAL transmission, not digital voice encryption. Our county uses the digital PL transmission, and we do not have any problems with background noise. My dept. isn't using the intergrated mask mics yet. We still use portable radios which you would think pick up even more BG noise since they aren't shielded by the mask. If the RRs are going digital voice encryption, all bets are off on a scanner picking it up. All you will hear will sound like alien noises.

My someone knows someone else that definately has one of the new radios and could ask them to key up on a road channel to see what it sounds like on a scanner?

They sound exactly the same as an old Motorola radio, having heard numerous new Icoms and Kenwoods transmitting...since they're programmed for traditional railroad radio use for the time being. And, from my point of view, the railroads aren't necessarily buying these radios *just* for the move to digital and narrowband - some of the Motorola radios out there are getting REALLY old, and radios do break...thus, they're going to have to buy something new anyway, and many of these newer radios come with these features at hand already (narrow-band capabilities, digital, etc.) - thus they're killing two birds with one stone. As I said before, there is far too much infrastructure that is incompatible with digital (heck, they're still just working on narrow-band capabilities)...meaning this move to digital with encryption, *IF* it happens, won't happen for a long time...as in decades. The railroads really have very little to gain out of a move to digital (security is nice, but not at the cost of billions of dollars in profits...I sincerely doubt the stockholders would approve) - to put it frankly, until they're forced to kicking and screaming (and likely with someone else footing much or all of the associated bill), it won't happen. Can we please put this topic to bed and get on with other topics?

You also have to take into consideration, if these can indeed 'track' someone (as in GPS), they WILL spend the money.
I also think these have the ability to have a ESN embedded that may be abled to be detected with each transmission. I'm not sure about this though.

AAR and RAC are members of the P25 committee which is the competing standard for digital radio. CSX going with NXDN is interesting.

RAC??

videobruce wrote:RAC??

Railroad Association of Canada.

Never heard of that before. Thanks.

CSX going with NXDN is interesting.

No, just 'par for the course' for this Nazi, southern fried mentality regime.

EMTRailfan wrote:OK, I'm confused now. I was under the impression that we were talking DIGITAL transmission, not digital voice encryption.

Digital PL is not the same as digital transmission, and this has nothing to do with encryption at all.

The problem in a fully digital system (if you listen on a conventional analog radio, all you'll hear is data noises) is that the vocoder (voice encoder) is often optimized for voice, not noise or even regular sine wave tones (such as pagers or DTMF). As mentioned, fire departments have encountered significant problems with background noise completely scrambling a transmission. Where with analog you can still pick the voice intelligence out, with digital the noise corrupts the entire translation from analog to digital and all is lost.

Delays on trunked radio systems are due to the negotiation that occurs between the radio and the repeater. On a simplex system, that delay on key-up won't be there, although there may be a slight lag in the audio - you'd hear it almost as an echo.