Hi,
Glad I found you guys. There isn’t a lot of good information about the DTRs out there, I was happy to run across this forum! I have the latest CPS installed, and I have some questions about security, programming, and how the DTRs work.
Is there a way to STOP the 550 from scanning the private groups at all times?
With the public groups - are there simply 20 public groups available on a DTR, and they’re discoverable by any other DTR regardless of what they’re called?
Thanks!!
Welcome! Glad you found us.
Is there a way to STOP the 550 from scanning the private groups at all times?
Chapter 3 in the manual, it’s part of the Advanced Radio Operations. If you don’t have the manual you can find it here.
With the public groups - are there simply 20 public groups available on a DTR, and they’re discoverable by any other DTR regardless of what they’re called?
Yeah, AFAIK. I never use them. (Public groups that is)
i see how to shut public group scanning off. Is there no way to disable private group scanning?
Remove yourself from that group.
Then, there’s no use in having multiple private groups that include all radios, correct?
There’s no reason to use groups except if you wish to group radios together in logical departments.
Groups are used to select several radios who wish to talk together. For example:
RADIOS
GROUPS
Pvt Group 1: Lights (LX1,LX2)
Pvt Group 2: Sound (SND1, SND2)
Pvt Group 3: Mgmt (MGT1, MGT2)
All (All 6 radios)
Calling Lights will only reach radios 1 & 2.
Calling All will reach all radios.
This might help (or make it more confusing).
I was thinking of having several private “channels” for different uses, and was surprised to find out that talking on one private group means that all radios who belong to that private group will receive the transmission WHETHER THEY ARE CURRENTLY TUNED TO THAT GROUP OR NOT. It appears the only way to have discrete ‘channels’ like this is to use public groups, which are, um, public (that is, discoverable by other DTRs). No solution here I assume.
I’m curious as to why you would need to set things up that way? Can you give an example of what you’re trying to do?
Think of private groups like e-mail lists. If you send to that e-mail list, everyone on it will receive the e-mail.
Apologies if necro-ing a post is poor form here, but I had exactly the same question as 97B and (I suspect) for the same reasons.
Basically, the question arises from a practice (that I thought was pretty common) of giving every radio in a system exactly the same programming. The radios themselves are effectively “stateless”, since any user from any department can grab any radio (particularly handy if their normal radio is broken), switch to their department’s channel, and proceed as normal. This also eases administration, since it means you can program all the radios in the system once and then basically never touch them again.
Obviously this ignores a great deal of the power of private groups, but (if it could be achieved) would still allow the privacy benefits of the private groups will maintaining the flexibility of the stateless approach.
I haven’t figure out a way to duplicate this behaviour with private groups, primarily because of the limitation (in-the-box, at least) that you can’t create a private group with no members.
(Also, FWIW, my understanding is that the newest generation of DTRs only listens to the current active private group by default, but that’s neither here nor there for those of us with older radios.)