Motorola Type II SmartZone

SmartZone systems are composed of Type II SmartNet systems that are networked together via microwave or land-line data circuits to provide multi-site wide-area communications. Many large public safety and state agencies use SmartZone systems for wide-area communications. Each individual trunked system is considered a site, or a sub-system if you are considering a Simulcast system, and is controlled by the Zone Controller, which is the master controller for all activity and is where all network links terminate. The primary types of sites are 6809 (named after the type of microprocessor used, and can be single or simulcast configurations), MTC 3600 (introduced to take the place of the 6809, and named for the speed of the control channel data stream in baud), and IntelliRepeaters (single-site only, a type of controllerless site). SmartZone allows efficient use of channels at each site by feature called "Dynamic Site Assignment", or DSA. DSA's simple purpose is to determine whether a site actually needs to broadcast a call or not. In order to make this feature work subscriber radios are required to affiliate, or send in their radio identification and selected talkgroup information whenever they power-up, change channels, or change sites. A programmable "timeout" can be set to automatically query any given radio to determine its affiliation status on the network. These affiliations are compiled into a table which the Zone Controller maintains. When a call is requested at a site, the Zone Controller determines which site that talkgroup is registered at and routes that audio via a switch, referred to as the Ambassador Electronics Bank (AEB), to the appropriate channel at the site. SmartZone allows seamless roaming between sites that is transparent to the user. To the user, the system, when properly configured, appears as just one large system, when in fact the user is actually roaming between several different sites at different locations.

The characteristics of a Motorola SmartZone system are similar to SmartNet systems with the following changes:

• Up to 28 channels per site
• Up to 64 sites (older Zone Controller versions were limited to 48)
• Analog and/or digital voice and/or analog/digital encryption

Monitoring a SmartZone system with a trunktracking scanner is the same process as monitoring any other Type II SmartNet system, except that you can only monitor one site at a time. For you to monitor a specific talkgroup, or TG, on a SmartZone site, a system users radio must be affiliated to that specific site. Therefore, if you are monitoring talkgroup "POLICE-NORTH" on a site with no affiliated radios on that talkgroup, then you will not hear any communications on that talkgroup on that site. Actually, the system CAN be programmed to send to certain tower sites certain talkgroups even with no user affiliated on that TG. This allows users who are on another TG but scanning to be able to hear traffic on that particular TG. Large utilities, like Entergy use this on their multiZoned network. At Entergy, TG 29 is used for interZone communications (An analog solution that people in the Texas Telecom group of Entergy (Current Texas Telecom supervisor Steve Gomez, former employee Chris Boone and others) came up with using certain boards extra to the CEB or Central Electronics Bank) to feed the 2175Hz Push To Talk tone to the other Zone controllers and a Tellabs audio bridge. The digital Omnilink option from Motorola is Mother M's answer to the problem and allows private call and all other features to work across Zones but Entergy has not bought the option since the analog solution worked though none of the special features within a Zone can work..only clear communication between all users happens but it sure was cheaper!) Entergy's 4 state SmartZone system was the largest in the world when it went online in 1995-96, with 50+ sites in each Zone.

The new MZC 3000 SmartZone Zone Controller introduced an Ethernet based connection point for sites, consoles, data broadcast boxes, and C/DIUs. This Zone Controller supports 64 sites in addition to the other pieces of hardware that previously limited the number of sites as the connection ports were shared.