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Looks like starting today WSP will be switching over to their Phase 2 700MHz trunking and P25 for their VHF in south area of King County. Next week they will start switching the north King County area over to TRS and digital. I wonder if they are going to simulcast on both VHF & TRS for awhile.

Confirmed. Hearing TGID 59210 currently on Phase 2. I haven't heard anything on 154.68 as yet. I wonder if they moved to Phase 2 only for now..?

TGID 59203 must be their Car-2-Car channel. One unit just asked a buddy how his voice sounds. "Does my voice sound like a 1980's Microsoft computer?"

TGID 59209 is active. No idea what it is yet.

I have to agree with the audio quality. It's very muddled at times. Some units are very clear and others sound like they're under water and speaking Swahili.

That's because WSP thought they knew better in the vocoder and DSP settings than the defaults that came from Motorola. I remember they had the same issues when they were on P25 in Tacoma.

Just heard WSP Seattle South doing some dispatching on State (155.970), analog.

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Whatever.....

I'm hearing that 154.680 went to P25 this morning.

I happened to check around 3am and 154.68 was on P25 but not hearing P25 as of right now. Looks like they're still fighting the digital gremlins.

So is the plan to switch all of WSP to 700mhz and go away from VHF or just certain areas.

I’m hearing WSP will simulcast into the foreseeable feature... But as always, especially with government, it's subject to change at any time.

Here's a quick example of the Phase 2 audio quality. It would really help if the dispatchers learned to slow down their speech a bit. I'm sure this will go over well with them. :)

http://home.comcast.net/~k7cj/wsp700a.mp3

This is while using an external antenna too... signal quality is not a factor here...

PS. I am hearing P25 on 154.68 VHF now...

I hear oodles of packet loss in that recording; Phase-2 should sound way better than that, even with the dispatcher not articulating enough for the vocoder.

Just as a footnote... If you recorded that off 700 MHz, according to what the forums say, you are correct that it's Phase-2. If on VHF, I can say with certainty that it's Phase-1 (because I'm monitoring with Phase-1 only capable radios). When yours does come in clearly, yours sounds better than what I'm hearing on VHF.

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Yes that's from the PSR-800 from Phase 2. Yesterday, I sniffed it with Pro96com and it's definitely TDMA.

I'm having a hard time picking up the P25 on VHF. It barely breaks the squelch on my XTS5000 and the 396XT can't even pick it up which is very strange. I can hear it fine on the V71 so not sure why the decode is off. Perhaps they're still tweaking the P25 VHF system.

I think the WSP dispatchers are just trained to be super-efficient with their speech and most talk very fast. I don't think the vocoder is able to keep up when they get in that mumble-zone where they talk a bit too fast and at the same tone.

The packet loss your hearing is probably from the PSR-800 decoding. If you had a Motorola, I think you would hear things differently.

A control channel is needed for Phase 2. Since VHF is all conventional with WSP, all traffic will be in Phase 1. Also, just because you have a TRS that is capable with Phase 2, doesn't mean it is always in Phase 2. Phase 2 TRS are backwards compatible with Phase 1 radios. So lets say a subscriber who has a phase 1 radio (XTS5000) and keys up or even logs onto a TG meant for Phase 2, the channel and/or frequency will go from Phase 2 (TDMA) to Phase 1 (FDMA).

I'm not so sure on that. I have similar recordings where the parties sound really good. If the PSR-800 was at fault, then I think I'd hear consistently poor audio quality.

My APX is decoding it perfectly.

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