Capacity Plus portables vs mobiles

[Eaton]

Hi there!

Having looked through some Capacity plus codeplugs I have noticed that system engineers here tend to program portables as conventional devices while mobiles are programmed with trunked channels.For example, a system has three sites. Mobiles have only 1 trunked channel and the site is voted automatically. Portables have 3 different channel, each representing one of the sites' traffic channel. If a mobile operator wants to make a call he/she selects their trunked channel and wait for the roaming to select the best site. If a portable operator wants to call anyone, he/she first should find out shich channel suits best (by RF or geographical means) and tries to make a call. If the radio issues a deny bonk then other channel should be tried.

One of the system engineers said it was their "policy" not to program portables in trunked mode. I didn't believe him and programmed my portable radio with "real" trunked channels just like mobile radio. It appeared that trunked portable performs poorly - it states "out of range" and scans for a site while conventional portable can place calls if the right channel is selected.
Why is it so?

The second question - if a portable makes a call on one of the traffic channels of a trunked site, can it interoperate with a trunked radio? I doubt a trunked radio can interoperate with a conventional one (vice versa) since one never knows which channel is selected by the radio when it is trunked.

Has anyone encountered any similar capacity plus systems?

Alex

 

[Forts]

I have multiple Capacity Plus systems in my 6550 and have never had an issue with it. There are also several other Cap+ systems in my area that use a large mix of mobiles and portables... The radio shops around here have no issue using portables on trunked systems.

 

[Jutod]

I have helped a large utility company (that has the same name as a popular NC college) with their linked capacity plus system, and I've done a lot of development work with Connect Plus. In my opinion there is no reason to program the radios differently. Sounds like someone made the decision to program the portables differently because they do indeed have different performance compared to a mobile. But hey..... they are portables however, with a rather limited performance as compared to a mobile unit. This performance difference is something that is thats always present in fleets of mobiles and portables mixed. But I'm not sure that they need to be programmed differently, as if they were on a different system. Seems to me that would cause split fleets at times, and people could be missing calls. So the possible loss of calls, and the need for portable users to know the topology of the system really outweighs any benefits to programming that way. Even if there is any benefit???