Prevent the 8am data storm with ARS Initialization Delay.

ARS is a feature that will make a MOTOTRBO radio announce its presence when turned on. The radio does this by sending a ARS burst to a predefined Radio ID (usually a Control Station). In most cases this works well but in some cases all the radios in a network may turn on at the same time every day (e.g. a fleet of delivery trucks). With a small number of radios this is no big problem but if there are than a hundred radios, you could end up with a blocked channel (data storm) while all the ARS bursts get processed.

If an ARS is not acknowledged, the radio will try several times before giving up so its a good idea to process these messages as quickly as possible. One way of preventing hundreds of ARS from blocking the channel is to use ARS Initialization Delay. When set to anything other than zero, the radio will wait a random amount of time before sending its ARS - the wait time is between zero and the value you set in the CPS (see above).

Using this feature has the effect of spreading the ARS messages out over a time period thus preventing contention and busy channels.

ARS is useful because it allows an application to display the status (on or off) of radios. This saves the dispatch operator from calling users who aren't there.