First off, hello to the forums! I have been a lurker for a while and only just made myself an account. I feel that people here will have the best answer to my problem.
What I am trying to achieve is to create a radio system for my home with the primary reason being security. Where we live, you are lucky to get mobile signal on the roof with your arm out stretched, and with a family of 10, we would like to be able to know where everyone is. Just to test what is on the market, I have bought two Baofeng BF-888s radios and one GT-3TP. They all work fine, but I am now looking for something more advanced and better range. With the situation being (and I know its weird) our house running full enterprise networking gear, generator backup power supplies and an array of servers, I have the infrastructure to add a complex radio system. I am based in the UK where all the police use MTH8000 radios and a TETRA radio system. So this was my first research area. From what I understand, TETRA radios support DMO. Does this mean that this would effectively extend the range of a communication? I have looked at TETRA, P25, DMR. It all is confusing! We run a PBX for phones, so RoIP integration would be nice if we every go down that route. So what I need is a radio system with the range we would need and the connectivity. I can buy radio licences easily over here if that help anything.
I have to say that this sounds business rather than family - but I guess that doesn’t really matter. You mentioned range twice - but didn’t say what range you actually need, so I’ll guess.
I assume it’s a large property that is bigger than the range of CEPT radio phones? I only say this because with every person having a real phone - they have contact with each other and of course the outside world? Radio systems are no problem whatsoever but leave everyone in a bubble.
First thing - the Police are dumping Airwave TETRA soon because it’s simply not really very good, in terms of cost vs facilities. When you say better range than the Boafengs - that’s radio to radio range? Why not simply buy a repeater, mount a proper antenna up high, and get a technically assigned UHF licence. All the radios in a fair range will be connected and everyone can talk to each other. With proper business radios in analogue you can have ID set up if you wish - so each radio has a number or family name that appears in the display of everyone else who hears it. If you go digital, the same system applies - radios or user names in displays. You can even send texts - but you won’t, because texts are like the first mobile phones - A is one push of the 1 key, C is 3 pushes of the same key. People used to iPhones hate them. If your mobile signal is iffy, if you could put up an omni wireless antenna somewhere high, their normal phones could run an app for IP communications, which might suit them better than radios.
DMR, P25, TETRA dPMR, and others are just flavours of digital (think betamax and VHS) With a new system there’s no real reason to not go digital, but I doubt you actually need any of their cleverer features.
The clever radios can also use emergency red buttons for panic situations and stuff like that, but my advice is to keep it all very simple. The clever radio systems are now all zoned, grouped and heirachy’d - which means too many button presses for emergency or critical use. Users forget to reset to the all channel after having a private chat on zone 2 front garden group or whatever - it often just gets silly.
Spend more than ?60 on a radio from china or ?250 for one of the top brands and you get these features. Analogue repeaters from maybe ?700, digital ones from around a grand - a nice high antenna system and range goes up nicely, but if your home is in the middle of the moors and you want 20 miles, then the price increases rapidly from somebody living on a small farm wanting a mile or so.
Thanks for your reply. It is really helpful to get some information from a human instead of snooping around Wiki pages.
I agree that what I am trying to do is on the business side of things, but often for people who work with / enjoy technology then consumer grade gear doesn’t often satisfy us!
As you said with out police, TETRA and Airwave, I have had a look at the MTH800s. A feature of them that I like the idea of is GPS. As I said, these radios are for security so to be able to see where people are at any time would be perfect for what we want! Am I right in thinking that over here, Airwave is a network that is all over the UK?
Again with P25, DMR and TETRA, would all of these offer the GPS functionality? And where would I start with looking for a system? I would need a repeater as most of the handsets are only 1W and range is a must with this system.
GPS creeps into quite a few radios below the ?100 mark, but the real question is that while the GPS data is encoded into the data, it means buying specific and expensive software to extract out and stick it on maps. What kind of area do you want to cover? Most of the radios have ID built in nowadays, on both analogue and digital. I suppose it really depends on what you want, what you need and what your budget will pay for.
Airwave is country wide, and is a branding for the TETRA system the emergency services are about to dump. They will be moving to a piggyback system on the EE phone network. Airwave plant to then sell their network to the commercial market. The reality for anyone with less than national needs is that a Tier II repeater system will probably be enough for a single area, or a trunked Tier III system for county+ use. Motorola offer quite a few systems as packages with software to allow all kinds of operational styles.