A serving of digital soup

In 2009 we’re all familiar with the term ‘digital’. We now have digital TV, digital set-top boxes, digital radio, our music library is stored in digital format and so on. We look at the 50-in LCD in the lounge room, pause for a second, take a look at the picture and think, well that was five grand well spent.

If John Laws was still broadcasting, we may have found it difficult to recognise those familiar dulcet tones broadcast in crystal clear digital audio. But digital technologies bring huge improvements in what we see and hear and it is truly a case of a very exact science manifesting itself in beautiful and simple sound and vision.

In the commercial digital two-way radio business, it’s not so simple.

The same benefits that digital technologies bring to our TV and audio equipment, while still inherent in commercial two-way technologies, are drowned in a soup of commercially driven options and benefits that often confuse the user.

These ‘benefits’ manifest themselves in a plethora of choices like individual calling, emergency calling, data capability and capacity, wide area coverage, trunked subscriber dialling, SMS and the list goes on.

The simplicity of clean, clear audio has been muddied in a fiercely competitive commercial market with manufacturers bending the RF delivery medium with a bunch of different protocols.

Of course, the nuances are just enough to force the consumer into a brand choice. So let the games begin!

Taste testing the digital soup reveals a vast array of protocols offering an even vaster array of only slightly different benefits. The problem is that most of the benefits are inherent and fundamental to the digital technology so it’s a case of which spices are added to make it more appealing?

Sadly, many of the key benefits of digital technology are wrapped in proprietary protocols that offer no interoperability (the ability to seamlessly communicate with different digital protocols).

The radio industry abounds with these divisive formats, that seem to spring up under strange pseudonyms at an ever-increasing rate.

Gilded with that ‘future of communications’ slogan, they offer all of the benefits of digital technology but push interoperability to the back of the bus.

On the one hand we can enjoy the many benefits and features offered by these protocols but we could also find ourselves locked out of interoperability with other user groups who have chosen a different manufacturer’s base infrastructure.

What would it be like if carriers such as Telstra, Optus and Vodaphone adopted the same approach? We might find ourselves having to change the SIM card or worse, changing the hardware to communicate with friends on a different network than ours.

Undoubtedly the mobile phone carriers are fiercely competitive but they provide a universal communications network in Australia and the competitive battle does not compromise interoperability.

Way back in 1967 when Captain Kirk uttered those immortal words “beam me up Scotty”, by all definitions he was using a digital communications device. In fact, his communicator boasted all the features inherent in today’s digital two-way communications.

It had a very low noise floor, probably operating on FDMA or TDMA platforms, it had interoperability with every civilisation the Enterprise encountered, so it could have been one of the more well-known open protocols, it was IP compatible, which allowed communications directly over the ship’s onboard computer and it had very wide area coverage over the subspace medium like digital trunked radio.

Kirk’s communicator also had many of the features of today’s digital communications such as high-speed data and voice messaging, GPS and AVL, lone worker and man-down functionality, and all of this in a device the size of the new GME TX3100 477 MHz mobile radio.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere and those noisy AM voice transmitters that needed a car boot space to mount them, but have we headed down the track of a universal communications platform?

It seems not, at least not in the commercial two-way radio business.

For some reason it seems that we need to take a great technology like digital, which offers naturally inherent benefits and features, and convolute it with branding distortions that seem at odds with the greater opportunity to facilitate a truly interoperable communications network.

Steve Newell recently joined GME as the commercial radio product manager and, incidentally, it is the same year that he celebrates 40 years in the commercial two-way radio business. Starting as an apprentice radio technician in 1969, Steve has seen a lot of changes in radio communications. One of his fondest career memories is sitting under a tree just outside Goondiwindi late on a summer afternoon with one of the first electronic typewriters and sending the text as a 1200 baud data stream back to the office in Sydney over a 7 MHz SSB signal on a Wagner HF radio. Did he mention the stubby? You've gotta love this industry!