"Concerned Officer" wrote in message
oups.com...

Paul Robson wrote:
On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 02:43:47 -0700, Concerned Officer wrote:

Let me be quite clear about a few things first of all. It is the
government's fault that police forces have had to switch to
Airwave.

snip

Be fair ! Why should it be different from any other government
project.

Of course, why should it be. But on the flip side of this, some
Government-sponsored systems work wonderfully. Radio and mobile
telephone technology is nothing new, and all airwave has done, really,
is throw encryption into the mix and make minor changes to the mobile
telephone model. What is so hard here?

You didn't really think it would work did you ???

Considering they spent £2.3bn (and counting!) on the system, I would
have hoped it to work slightly better than the quality I can get out of
two tin cans and a piece of string. Sad, really.

Cheers,

PC A.N. Other.

Hello,

Cheshire already had encryption for years, it was the MASC system from
Marconi and it worked VERY well. It was a repeater system covering the
entire area so everyone was on "talkthrough". No silly pips all the time,
people could hear every other person. Last time I looked it was on
£2.9billion for Airwave.
Cheshire never suffered the same as Merseyside - they were never blocked out
on channels, even 22VHF that the patrols used as a chat channel between them
when they should have been monitoring CH2. No one could listen in either,
so why spend all that money on a system that is reinventing old ideas - was
not fully tested and doesn't work correctly.
Has your control room also mentioned that the radios have GPS built in, so
they can see EXACTLY where each patrol is on a map on the PC? That's why
pushing the emergency button shows them which patrol is calling and where
they are! So each PC is being watched.