Digital is noisy af. When we switched from analog to digital at work (same radios, just a software upgrade) they started to interfere with loads of equipment.

[–] bandario@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It also seems kind of a bad choice for emergency services.

I know when we trialled going digital for fire response at my old company it was an absolute failure.

At least with analogue when there was interference from smoke or terrain, we could mostly get the gist of what had been said.

With digital it seemed to either work or not work, there was no in-between.

It was more akin to transmitting a short audio file or recording than a live communications medium. Not a single one of us thought it was an improvement on our existing system but of course they rolled it out anyway. Can't fight progress.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For sure, digital dont on do well outside of ideal conditions. There are a few women in the plant who's voices are above 1/2 of the sample frequency so their calls come across as 100% aliasing after it gets compressed and encoded.

I think digital was chosen for us because they can have dozens of virtual channels on one frequency where as on analog they were paying for a licence transmit on several.

/edit: a typo