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Someone Somewhere · October 24th 16, 09:09 AM posted to uk.transport.london

On 24/10/2016 09:58, wrote:
In article , (Someone
Somewhere) wrote:

On 23/10/2016 00:41, wrote:
A substantial cottage industry
grew up finding and repairing such radios to keep the railway going. No
doubt the same sort of thing will have to happen with the successor
GSM-R technology.

I'd hope it wasn't necessary - from memory of my short time playing
with GSM-R the vast majority of the "technology" was just a big IN
platform in the network and a vast number of strange rules, so
realistically any GSM handset should work (although were there
changes to ensure they worked at full HST speeds, in which case I
wish the cottage industry luck with fixing that kind of thing!)

Actually - I've just looked and they decided to use different
frequencies which introduced a level of protectionism that seems
unnecessary.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly but the cottage industry is for the
NRN (and radio signalling in the Highlands) environment, not GSM-R which I
think has now replaced NRN. For a long time NRN had shut down in the south
but continued in the north. Maybe you are right that a similar industry will
not arise for GSM-R in due course but there is no successor on the horizon
at present of course.

No - I understood you - it's just that if they are GSM derived devices
almost everything will be on a very small number of chips and hence the
concept of repair may be incredibly difficult, but then again if
somewhere in the heart of a big cab GSM-R set is the guts of an old
Nokia 6310i or similar then it may be very easy to source parts for a while.