The layout of a Multi-Site Tait DMR Tier 2 network

Watch the Video - Layout of a Multi-site Tait DMR Tier 2 NetworkIain Scott, Senior Design Engineer and Evan Forester, Content Marketing Manager have put together a series of videos taking us through Tait DMR networks.

In this video learn more about the layout of a multi-site Tait DMR Tier 2 network.

You can also watch the other videos in the series:

If you have a suggestion for other videos or any questions for Iain or Evan, please leave them in the comments below.

Video Transcript

Evan: Hi, everyone. I’m here with Iain. And what is your role at Tait, Iain?

Iain: I am a senior design engineer at Tait Electronics. I work on the network infrastructure products at Tait. I look after what’s called “node”, and I’m going to explain today why we have one of these in the Tier 2 network.

Evan: Okay, so you are the right person to explain the Tait DMR Tier 2 multi-site network, and you’ve painstakingly drawn this thing for us. Could you explain what’s going on here?

Iain: Okay, so we’ll start at the beginning with Tier 2. You basically have some mobiles and terminals, and that’ll talk to the site somewhere. So this is your typical single site, DMR Tier 2 network. This is our Tier 2 base station. You have some combined antenna and radios can talk backwards and forward. In the real world, this gives you a small coverage area. So if they want more coverage, you want to have multi-sites. So you want to be able to have radios at one part of your city or somewhere else to talk to radios on a different site. So what I’ve joined here is one site here and these other sites over here. This is the same thing. Your base station combining here and antennas, and you’ll have mobiles and radios talking here.

Now with Tier 2, this is just like Tier 3. Everything’s connected using IP. So audio comes in into the base station. It gets converted into packets and they could see it for IP through to the rest of the system. Now our Tier 2 solution, we have provided a node which does lots of clever stuff.

Evan: Okay, so that’s interesting that we have a node here for the DMR Tier 2 network. Why do we have a node?

Iain: So there’s a lot of reasons we have a node in our system.

Evan: Because not everyone has a node in their system.

Iain: No. A lot of other solutions, they have basically site controls and these guys who talk to each other and work out who should be talking and who’s allowed to talk. So in our solution, we’ve moved this complexity into the node, so it’s all in one place. Now the advantage it gives us is that we have much better control of the floor of who’s talking. We can now hook up all sorts of interfaces as well. It makes it a lot easier.

The main one that people want is the Dispatch Consoles. So in this case, these consoles only need to talk to one node. You don’t have to have these hooked up to base stations. It means that in terms of IP connections, they’re not going up links to hills or things like that. They can just talk to a node, which has been some central point. It makes it a lot easier to set up.

Now if you know anything about Tier 3, then this is exactly the same in Tier 2. We have all the same interfaces that we have in Tier 3. So we get a voice recorder. So we can record everything that’s happening on the system. we have, everything can be configured through the web, so you can use any computer to configure our system.

Now all the other interfaces you also get now are phone calls. You can make phone calls through the system. It’s a common interface of talking to phone connections. We’ve got an AVL interface, so you can monitor what all the radios in your system are doing. Standard stuff like SNMP and Syslog should get through with Tier 2. We have interfaces that provide call records, statistics, and all of these can be fed using JSON out to customer applications. So this makes it really flexible for customers. They have all sorts of information available if they want it. If they just want a basic Tier 2, then you turn it to use these extra interfaces.

Evan: Okay, so last question. What areas do I need to consider when provisioning connectivity for the network?

Iain: So in this diagram, I’ve sort of drawn this cloud, but in reality from your site back to some essential point, generally you’re going to have to have some link. Now the way you provide these links, there’s so many different ways. So this is all standard IP stuff. So this is your link that provides you an IP backbone between your base station and the rest of the system. and typical things here, microwave links, E1/T1 links. You could even copper and all that sort of stuff.

We do have limitations on how much we have to parse through the system.

Now in terms of the capacity we need on this link, we’ve got a technical node that explains all the details of it. But the simple one is that you need 64 kbps for each base station you wanted to be able to provide the packets through the system.

Evan: Okay. All right, well, Iain, thank you for giving us the lay of the land for the DMR Tier 2 multi-site network.

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