[ScanIndiana] Digital vs Analog

[David L Norris]

On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 06:24 -0600, Les Coburn, N9TRZ wrote:
> I remember when there was talk of going digital on Project SafeT and there were many members quite 
> anti digital because of quality and such, 

Well, digital sounds surprisingly better than analog at good signal
levels.  Digital is crystal clear at signal levels where analog would be
noisy.  Digital is completely unreadable at signal levels where analog
may still be readable by a trained individual.  Overall, I think digital
is technically superior.  Digital simply doesn't degrade gracefully.
Someone will be talking perfectly clearly and completely disappear
mid-sentence instead of just becoming noisy.

I think a lot of scanner listeners were turned off by the first digital
scanners because the quality was horrendously bad and there were all
sorts of settings you had to twiddle to make it decode anything at all.
The Motorola radios themselves are fairly impressive.  And the newer
(particularly the Radio Shack/GRE) scanners are quite similar in design
to the Motorola radios.

The main problem with the SAFE-T system, if there is one, is that the
towers are spread fairly thin.  And 800 MHz has some irritating quirks.
I'm partial to VHF, myself.  I think a statewide VHF digital trunked
system would be great.  Maybe not practical but I think it would be
great.

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039