Professional mobile radio (also known as private mobile radio (PMR) in the UK) are person-to-person two-way radio voice communications systems which use portable, mobile, base station, and dispatch console radios. PMR systems are based on such standards as MPT-1327, TETRA, APCO 25, and DMR which are designed for dedicated use by specific organizations, or standards such as NXDN intended for general commercial use. These systems are used by police, fire, ambulance, and emergency services, and by commercial firms such as taxis and delivery services. Most systems are half-duplex, in which multiple radios share a common radio channel, and only one can transmit at a time. Transceivers are normally in receive mode, the user presses a push-to-talk button on his microphone when he wants to talk, which turns on his transmitter and turns off his receiver. They use channels in the VHF and UHF bands, giving them a limited range, usually 3 to 20 miles (5 to 30 km) depending on terrain. Output power is typically limited to 4 watts. Repeaters installed on tall buildings, hills or mountain peaks are used to increase the range of systems.
Introduction When private- or professional-mobile-radio (PMR) first started the systems simply consisted of a single base station with a number of mobiles that could communicate with this single base station. These systems are still in widespread use today with taxi firms and many others using them for communication. Now facilities such as DTMF and CTCSS provide additional calling selection. Because the antenna may be mounted on a high tower, coverage may extend up to distances of fifty kilometres (30 miles). This is helpful especially when there is no signal in a GSM mobile phone. Licenses are allocated for operation on a particular channel or channels. The user can then have use of these channels to contact the mobile stations in their fleet. The base station may be run by the user themselves or it may be run by an operating company who will hire out channels to individual users. In this way a single base station with a number of different channels can be run by one operator for a number of different users and this makes efficient use of the base station equipment. The base station site can also be located at a position that will give optimum radio coverage, and private lines can be provided to connect the users control office to the transmitter site. As there is no incremental cost for the transmissions that are made, individual calls are not charged, but instead there is a rental for overall use of the system. For those users with their own licences they naturally have to pay for the licence and the cost of purchase and maintenance of that equipment. The term PMR is often used by the public and magazine publishing to refer to the low power (500 milliwatt) PMR446 license exempt radio systems that consist of sixteen FM frequencies between 446.00625 and 446.19375 MHz for analog FM and thirty-two FDMA (digital) channels between 446.003125 and 446.196875 MHz. These are used for personal or business communications where they are legal. Split frequency repeaters are not allowed on these frequencies and these radios do not communicate with licensed PMR systems. PMR446 radios are much cheaper than those used for the licensed PMR systems.
Modulation In general narrow band frequency modulation is the chosen form of modulation, although airport services use amplitude modulation. Typically a deviation of 2.5 kHz is used for FM and this enables a channel spacing of 12.5 kHz to be implemented. As the demands for PMR are high, it is necessary to make effective use of the channels available. This is achieved by re-using the frequencies in different areas. Base stations must be located sufficiently far apart so that interference is not experienced, and also selective calling techniques such as CTCSS and DTMF are used to ensure that as many mobiles as possible can use a given channel.
Selective calling
The simplest systems operate with all the radios on a frequency channel being able to hear all the calls being made. In some applications this may not be desirable and a system of selective calling may be required, in which two radios on a channel can have a private conversation which is not received by the others, or in which a specific radio can be promptly contacted and made to "ring" almost like an ordinary phone. Two widely used systems are Dual Tone Multiple Frequency (DTMF), and Continuous Tone Coded Squelch System (CTCSS).
DTMF
A DTMF selective signaling PMRS system uses a code sequence of discrete audible tones, representing numbers, transmitted at the beginning of each voice message to address the transmission to a specific station or group of stations. The DTMF (dual tone multifrequency) code is used, which is also universally used for touch-tone dialing in the worldwide public telephone network. The eight audio frequencies used in DTMF are 697, 770, 852, 941 Hz which are called the "low tones" and 1,209; 1,336; 1,477; and 1,633 Hz which are the "high tones". Pairs of one high and one low tone transmitted together represent a decimal number. Each station is assigned a unique DTMF callsign, consisting of several numbers. The squelch circuit in each radio decodes the tones and turns the receiver audio on if the transmission is addressed to that radio. There is also a code for "broadcast" transmissions, which causes the transmission to be received by all the radios on the channel. A disadvantage of this system is that since the DTMF code is sent only once at the beginning of a message, if the receiver does not pick up the code due to temporary noise or bad signal conditions the receiver will not turn on and it will miss the entire message. This can be a significant disadvantage because mobile stations often lose the signal for short periods as they are on the move.
CTCSS
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