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What's New in 8.8

DISCLAIMER

Texts presented in the article may differ from posts made earlier. The texts are reworked in favor of readability.

New and Updated Features§

Support for new MOTOTRBO R2.5 firmware§

280-Characters Text Messages§

SmartPTT Dispatcher now can send and receive text messages up to 280 characters long in MOTOTRBO systems. It does not require any special settings in SmartPTT. These additional characters can be used to provide more detailed information to the radio subscribers.

RG-1000§

Meet SmartPTT RG-1000 - remote gateway that is used to connect MOTOTRBO control station to SmartPTT Radioserver using IP channel

  • Easy system configuration and deployment.
  • Cost reduction.
  • Transparent support of RG-1000 in all types of the SmartPTT configurations with the control stations involved.

User interface customization is reaching new heights§

  • Channels panel — simple and convenient representation of all dispatch radio systems: one channel per box.

    Note: For trunking systems only one element per system can be displayed, but it will show you all ongoing calls in the system.

  • In case of experimenting with the user interface, now it’s very easy to get back to default view. Just go to the UI Layout Settings menu and select one of two default layouts, or add your own.

  • The content of the custom console elements is now automatically scaled when you enlarge or reduce them. The custom console elements can be reduced to occupy the screen space more efficiently.
  • Custom pictures at the custom console.
  • Company logo can be put in constant visibility right on the custom console, as well as the emergency handling and call processing instructions, as the Image element or as the Wallpaper for the whole console.
  • New Multiselect element at the custom console. The Multiselect element makes a broadcast call to the preconfigured set of subscribers and groups in one touch.

System Monitoring enhancement, Coverage Map that fits your needs and other improvements§

  • RSSI ranges are completely customizable — thresholds, colors, number of ranges can be selected. Default settings were simplified, so the system engineers can quickly get better understanding of the coverage of the system.
  • SmartPTT now provides more control over the list of subscribers whose data will be used for the coverage map creation. Now you can select all subscribers at once, only certain subscribers, or the subscribers of the specific subscriber’s category.
  • The real-time system monitoring was simplified — 15 different types of transmissions were merged into 8 easier-to-understand groups.
  • More channels can be monitored simultaneously thanks to the optimized condensed view.
  • The Refresh button was added to the Diagnostics panel to read current repeater parameters quickly.
  • Support for the new types of hardware to be monitored via SNMP: SuperMicro servers, UPS APC5000, Huawei routers.

Performance optimization for the large systems§

  • The system performance at the launch of the dispatcher console was optimized for the systems with more than 2000 subscribers on the records.

  • Databases performance was greatly increased to handle large amounts of data.

    Note

    The existing installations require one-time optimization of the databases to get benefits from this change. This optimization can take a few hours (depending of on the database size) and SmartPTT Radioserver will be unavailable during this time. Please schedule optimization process accordingly.

  • An ability to set the radioserver process priority in SmartPTT Radioserver Configurator. Raising the process priority allows OS to allocate automatically more processing power to the radioserver process in case of high system load.

  • Quick configuration and exchange of information about radio subscribers with convenient Import and Export tools. Now these tools support even more formats: CSV, Microsoft Excel and XML files.

Interface and behavior changes§

  • Improved reliability of voice calls for complex IP networks. All clients now use the special algorithm that allows dispatchers, web consoles or mobile clients to make voice calls even behind NAT without port forwarding configured.
  • An access to the Web client and SmartPTT Mobile is now managed in SmartPTT Radioserver Configurator, instead of a separate app.
  • SmartPTT Mobile doesn’t require the installation and configuration of Microsoft IIS anymore.
  • Hangtime for the analog calls was added. If new transmission is made on analog channel during the hangtime after the end of the previous transmission, both transmissions will be considered as the parts of one ongoing conversation (logical call). This simplifies voice recording and event log management for the analog systems.
  • Option to select DMR Vocoder for control stations was added to fix bad voice quality in cross-patch between control stations and IP connection to repeaters.
  • New access policies for operators were added to allow them configuring Statuses, Rules and Alerts, GPS rules, Lone Worker rules.

  • Ability to initiate private calls for specific dispatchers can now be limited via the new setting in Profiles in SmartPTT Radioserver Configurator.

    Note

    Dispatchers still will be able to answer private calls initiated by other subscribers.

  • Capacity Plus Legacy system architecture was rebuilt from scratch to increase reliability and simplify future support.

  • Support for the Windows authentication. It is now possible to use the Windows authentication to login to SmartPTT dispatcher automatically. If the Windows username or one of the names of his groups matches the operator name in SmartPTT console, the dispatcher application will not ask for password, and will start automatically under that operator.
  • Easily to minimize or to maximize panels that were separated from the main window. So if you display a map on the second screen, it will take a second to maximize a map window and use the entire screen space.
  • The Positioning Systems configuration window was changed, and parameters were split into two separate tabs: Coordinates and Map.
  • Prefixes in the phone mask that are included in curly brackets {} are not truncated now.
  • Text message that is sent together with the telemetry information by the radio subscriber, is displayed in Call Window and Event Log.
  • SmartPTT Man Down GOB firmware allows you now to set the maximum number of alarms to be sent in case of emergency.

Suspended§

  • The Listen calls of other dispatchers and the Listen calls of radio subscribers checkboxes were removed as redundant from the operator settings and phone system settings accordingly. From now phone calls and calls of other dispatchers follow the same access rules as those set for radio calls. The Private calls between subscribers checkbox is now responsible for all private calls, including other dispatchers speaking with subscribers, or private phone calls to or from the radio subscribers. Enabling group in the profile allows listening to phone calls to that group or other dispatchers making calls to that group.
  • The Geofences import was removed due to the low usage of the feature, more convenient alternative options are available now.
  • Support of the Radio Activity RA-xxx base stations was deprecated due to cancellation of this product by the manufacturer. If you’re interested in the integration of the Radio Activity systems and SmartPTT software, please contact us.
  • The reports in Web Client were deprecated for the version 8.8, but they will be returned in the later versions.

See Also§