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[email protected] · October 24th 16, 11:13 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Someone
Somewhere) wrote:

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.

Cannibalisation as I said. But there's no need for the foreseeable future as
I presume there are currently manufactured models that could replace older
GSM-R kit.

--
Colin Rosenstiel