[TheList] Tait Communications has agreement with Team Talk to supply and build its new nationwide digital mobile radio network

Fri Dec 15 21:56:12 AEDT 2017

Slowly. There's still a lot of MCX760/780s and, T2040s in the wild, and therefore still need to be supported by the networks, but the reality is Digital is the way of the future for most customers.  There are still things like MCX1200Es... Probably a 25+ year old RT, that needs a DOS laptop to program. DOSBox isn't always your friend.  Most Motorola dealers won't support these anymore, because no parts, don't have a DOS laptop etc.  So they're slowly getting removed from service, but people have some ancient crap out there, trust me.  People are odd too, they'll happily drop $200,000+ on a new truck/trailer/tractor/bulldozer but want to reuse these 20 year old RTs, because $1200 is a bit much for a new one haha.  I still haven't worked out the logic with that, but that's another story 

 Fleetlink and ActionNet (ActionNet isn't as well known, but works the same as Fleetlink) are two old trunking systems by Teamtalk.  I believe the gear is based on old Tait mobile RTs acting as a repeater with a controller doing the hard work, and one of the limitations that Teamtalk set is 3site select.. This is their way of doing group calling over Fleetlink/ActionNet.. Basically you dial a group number in your fleet that has 3 sites preselected. All users on your fleet that's logged into those 3 sites (plus the originating site,) hear the group call. However those not logged into that site will miss it.

IE in the waikato, group90 could be made up of San Hill (Cambridge) Maungakawa (North East Huntly) and Ranginui (East of Te Kuiti) to give Waikato area coverage.. A supervisor on say.. Skytower (Auckland..) could do a group call by dialing 90 to his staff which will work fine.. But if his staff did a group call on 90,  the supervisor will miss the group call and noone would know he's misses it (short of him not responding) 

When Fleetlink and ActionNet was designed, it really had individual calls in mind.  3site select was bought in to reduce the network load.  Some sites might have 5 trunking channels, plus the control channel, if you had group calls going over the whole node, you'd potentially quickly fill up those channels on some sites and not others.  On the flipside, Digital trunking (DMR Tier3 uses TDMA so a 6 channel analog site, can potentially be changed to a 6 channel digital site - with timeslots now giving 12 'channels') is mostly done by group calls (but private calls are possible) and nowadays people seem to be more interested in Group calls, but want the coverage of one of the Teamtalk networks.  For some customers, it's also easier to pay $40/month per subscriber plus buy/lease an RT, than it is to set up their own repeater network and have ongoing maintenance costs etc.  When a TT repeater/site goes down, they lose comms, but don't have to fix it.  Some customers want complete control over their system, and don't want to wait for a spare repeater channel to be free if they are high voice traffic customer so Teamtalk isn't a suitable option for them.  A lot of people are also quite happy paying 150/year to RSM for their own conventional simplex channel because they don't need the geographical coverage. You also get the odd customer who just want to use PRS because they don't want to pay a yearly RSM fee, which is just a health and safety disaster in the making. 

Teamtalk was all about trunking, but now they want to get into conventional stuff more than they currently are (they supply single site repeaters, plus own the repeater gear for Auckland Fire UHF network, and St Johns repeater network etc.)
Richard
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Sent from a mobile device. Please excuse my brevity, punctuation and spelling. 

On 15 December 2017 8:59:25 PM NZDT, Radio Scanner <rs157950 at gmail.com> wrote:
>So does that signal the end of the MPT1327 network?
>
>On 15/12/2017 8:51 p.m., Stephen wrote:
>>
>>
>https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/99830471/teamtalk-deal-also-a-boon-for-taits-mobile-radio-research-and-development
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>>
>>
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