Motorola Type II
From The RadioReference Wiki
Trunked Radio Systems → Motorola Type II
Motorola Type II refers to the second generation Motorola Trunked Radio Systems that replaced fleets and subfleets with the concept of talkgroups and individual radio IDs.
Variations of the Type II Trunking system include:
- Motorola Type IIi Hybrid
- Motorola Type II Smartnet
- Motorola Type II SmartZone
- Motorola Type II SmartZone OmniLink
- Motorola Type II VOC
Talkgroup and Radio ID Display
Type II systems have no dependencies on fleetmaps, and therefore no limitations to how many radio ids that can participate on a talkgroup. This allows for greater flexibility for the agency.
Motorola Type II talkgroups appear on a scanner as an even number without a hyphen, ranging from 16 to 65504 in increments of 16 or 32 (depending on whether the system uses Priority Monitor or not). Talkgroups on systems using Priority Monitor will display as 16, 48, 80, 112 and so on; on systems where Priority Monitor is not used, talkgroups display as 16, 32, 48, 64, 80 and so on.
Individual radio IDs, on the other hand, appear as a number between 1 and 65534; while Type II systems have some gaps in usable IDs (for system technical reasons), most are capable of up to at least 65000 individual radio IDs.
Emergency Flagging
Motorola systems have two potential forms of flagging a talk group as being in an emergency mode (this gives a user priority on a talk group until the emergency state is cleared by the user or the dispatcher): the first method is to set a status bit in the management traffic, the second is to shift the talk group ID by +2 and patching it to the original talk group ID (+0). Uniden scanners are only capable of detecting the first method. A hack of a solution is to add the original talk group ID and the offset talk group ID (+2) to the system in the scanner and set the priority of the +2 talk group ID to be On; one can then add an alert tone and alert backlight to the offset talk group to simulate the emergency detection functionality available to systems that use the second flagging method.