Daniels, Telex debut P25 radio-dispatch interface
Daniels Electronics and Telex jointly announced the creation of a Project 25–compliant, digital fixed station interface (DFSI) that lets users connect Daniels’ land-mobile radios to Telex dispatch consoles. The companies are showcasing the DFSI this week at IWCE 2010 in Las Vegas.
“Now we have end-to-end connectivity in a P25 network from the handheld, through the repeaters, to our base station, through the fixed station interface, to the console — all digital, all encrypted, with all of the P25 messages passed,” said Gerry Wight, Daniels’ director of marketing.
The end-to-end connectivity is a key attribute, Wight said. “With end-to-end encryption, there’s nothing unsecure anywhere in the conversation, which would be important in a police environment” he said. “There’s also no vocoding, so there’s no conversion of the audio and no resulting loss of quality or delays.”
The ability to pass all of the P25 messages also is important, according to Wight. “It passes along things like your GPS location and your emergency [indicator],” he said. “So, if there’s an emergency, the emergency ID will identify the officer, and the console will get a screen pop that says, ‘Officer Smith is down at this location.’ You don’t get those capabilities with analog.”
Previously, Daniels worked with Zetron and Avtec on similar interfaces. “That’s what P25 is supposed to be all about — interoperability in a pure digital fashion between multiple vendors. We’ve now demonstrated that,” Wight said.
Daniels also announced the second generation of an interface developed with Catalyst Communications Technologies, which Wight described as “a step down” from its P25 digital fixed station interfaces. “The audio is not encrypted and it’s not P25 audio, but we’re still passing along the messaging. So, it’s kind of a precursor to full-blown P25.”
The capability is ideal for entities such as a public utility or a forestry service, which doesn’t need to move to a P25 system, but still wants the emergency indicator and location capabilities that the digital standard provides, Wight said. “If I’m a hydro, and a guy falls off a tower, I’ll know who the guy is and what tower he fell off.”
Daniels also is introducing at IWCE a larger battery unit for its portable repeaters that are designed to handle “four or five cross bands,” Wight said.
Finally, Daniels is showing a reconfiguration of a trunked radio system launched last year. “We’ve made it more robust by separating each of the channels into a separate set of hardware, so if one power supply fails or one set of cables breaks, it only will take one channel down instead of several,” Wight said. “We’ve also made the trunking controller fully redundant and backed it up with a UPS [uninterruptible power supply], so if there’s a power glitch the brains won’t go dead.”