Need to cut through the BS on Alarm monitoring costs

[blueman]

I am looking for honest, unbiased, unemotional answers to this
question. (I know it's Usenet, but one can always hope...)

I currently have a fire & burglary monitoring policy with the local
dominant alarm company. I own the equipment and I am responsible for
service charges to fix the equipment.

They charge me $36/month for straight Internet monitoring.

National online monitoring companies offer seemingly the same service
for $8.95/month. Or 1/4 the cost.

My high-priced local company claims:
- They are big (20,000 customers) - but the national competitor claims
40,000 customers

- Their service center is "local" -- but it's really halfway across the
state so does that really mean anything in the day of the Internet

- They are a "security company" vs. competitors being "monitoring"
companies. Though not sure what that means or why I care

- They have a 5-star UL-listed center - but the national competitor
claims to be UL-listed and it's not clear what 5-stars means and who
even grants such certification. Sounds like marketing hype.

- They have 30-second average response time -- but competitor claims the
same

- They say they have a better BBB track record than big national
competitors - but the competitor claims an A+ BBB rating which can't
be too bad

The bottom line is that I can't see one compelling reason to pay 4 times
the competitor rate for what seems to be a commodity service.

- I live in a very safe, low crime neighborhood.

- I primarily pay for the monitoring to get the insurance break.

- I don't stay up nights worrying about fires or burglaries and in any
case I still have the in-house alarm to warn me of a fire and scare
off amateur burgalers.

- I am technically adept and have no problem servicing and programming
my system

Seems like worst case perhaps the response time will be a few seconds
longer in some rare cases or maybe there is a small chance they will
make a mistake -- but the point is that there are so many other failure
points in a security system and we are talking about rare events (fire,
burglary) anyway.

So, why pay 4 times as much????

 

[blueman]

Go to that national service and find out the hard way. What they
promise and what they deliver is another story.
I have seen national centers take 20 minutes to dispatch a fire
system . owe did I mention the phone calls in middle of night because
your system did not test or some other thing that could wait till
morning go ahead go to that other service you will gladly pay 10
times the cost to go back to what you have.

I asked to avoid the emotional marketing hype and hyperbole.
- I highly doubt 20 minutes to dispatch a fire system is the rule or
even the exception
- I hightly doubt test calls in the middle of the night are a regular
feature (they staff less overnight and probably have to pay more).
- I highly doubt it would be worth paying 4 times the amount let alone
10 times for a protection that I barely use (the burgularly part since
we often don't even arm the system) or the rare case of a fire where
we are away or don't hear the alarm and need someone else to call for
us

I would almost guarantee you work for one of those companies trying to
scam users with high fees.

Your response was a waste of bandwidth and exactly what I wanted to
avoid.

I would be happy to entertain fact-based and documented differences in
service levels. But ridiculous generic scare stories without facts or
logical basis are less than worthless...

 

[blueman]

RHC; Sir, you pose a valid and excellent question. Bottom line, no
matter what anyone says, monitoring is pretty much the same wherever
you get it, regardless of price. Provided you are capable and willing
to look after your system yourself, there is no reason NOT to use the
most reasonable monitoring station around. Especially so if all you
need is the insurance certificate for home insurance reduction.

That is the primary reason we have the system.

However, in fairness, I have rarely ever found any end user competent
enough to really understand the total functionality of his alarm

p> system, so think that one through carefully.

Valid point. However, the fact is that I actually know the system better
than the senior techs at this large regional company. I use the dealer
version of RemoteLink to access/program the DMP XR200 system. I have
reverse-engineered much of the RemoteLink protocol and have written a
range of perl scripts that allow me to do everything from send the local
weather to the keyboard status line every half hour, to sending calendar
reminders to the status line, to automatically arming and disarming the
system with different bypass lists based on an arbitrarily-complex
schedule (e.g., holidays, vacations, sunrise/sunset times). I can
control my system via my cell phone by sending codes to my Linux server
that then interface with the alarm via the RemotLink protocol. I
actually have been tempted to distribute the Perl Library I wrote for
this. Also, I have added and reprogrammed many sensors on my system.

Bottom line is that I am not worried about my ability to service the
system on my end.

As a professional dealer for 20 some years, I see the market laid out
in different pricing segments as I will outline below. Firstly, know
that basic professional monitoring is available to dealers everywhere
from $1 to $3 monthly per account. All monies collected above pays for
profit and the legitimate costs of running the dealers business, or
goes into the high cost of running a large national organization.

Price category 1 - Monitoring sold directly to end users for $10 or
less by the monitoring station with no dealer interface. This is the
domain of the "cream skimmers" who provide only monitoring services
but no direct service or warranty service, or sub it out to expensive
subcontractors in various cities.

This seems to be the $8.95 type deal I am seeing.

Price category 2 - Monitoring sold through dealers from $10 to $20 who
throw in (usually) a measure of service and warranty, with or without
a long term contract. This is usually the domain of small independent
alarm companies (who are not usually well advertised in a given area,
but hold about 85% of the North American market share).

Price category 3 - Monitoring sold through medium to larger alarm
companies from $20 to $30 monthly, usually with a measure of service
and warranty (often at additional monthly price), usually with a long
term contract, often with reduced pricing up front..ie: :"free
system", and often with national coverage

This is the category of my current provider though they charge beyond
the upper range you cite since my fee is $36/month. Moreover, this does
*not* include any service on my end. I have to pay premium hourly rates
for any service call for labor plus materials. The service contract
would add about an additional $15/month. Additionally, I paid full price
labor and materials for installation up front (about $7000).

Clearly, I am being ripped off and to make matters worse the company has
raised my rates 50% since I first signed on 6 years ago even as
inflation has been nil. They cited all types of bogus reasons for
increased costs while the true cost to service me has actually gone down
since I switched from dial-up to Internet monitoring and the company
itself has grown in scale by acquisition and consolidation.

Price category 4 - Monitoring sold through the largest companies (such
as ADT, Brinks etc), always with highly restrictive contracts from $30
to $40 monthly, and generally very expensive and sometimes with long
service times.

Where an "end user" customer buys his monitoring services is largely a
measure of how receptive he is to large advertising campaigns and the
hype that goes with them (big national companies spend large amounts
to garner exposure, knowing most consumers don't shop around very
much). No matter how much larger companies and larger monitoring
stations insist they offer "better response" times, there is much more
to it than merely having a multitude of stations around, or even
having them interconnected as does the largest company. Monitoring
here in Canada is strictly ULC qualified, and all companies large and
small must meet stringent standards to keep their insurance listing. I
suspect it is the same in the US. It matters little whether you are a
small independant monitoring station or a large national....by and
large you as an end user can normally expect excellent service under
most conditions of traffic volume. Nor does it matter whether the
station is "local" to you or long distance - it's simply a phone call
at its most basic level.

Exactly, both my current provider and the ones that I am considering are
UL certified. Thought the current provider claims some type of 5-star
certification which I would doubt is a UL thing since UL doesn't usually
give out gold stars
Also, even my current provider only quotes a 30 second average response
time which itself seems to be industry standard. Plus averages are just
that - averages.

It is up to YOU, the knowledgeable consumer to make sure that whoever
monitors your system, for whatever price, also follows these
guidelines as a minimum:

1- Your panel must be programmed with an auto test signal to ensure
it's continued functionality.

Yes - I know how to do that and how to set the interval on that.
In fact, one of the issues with my current way over-priced providers is
that we get frequent transmit trouble codes and I know the problem is
not on my end (since I have tested by constantly pinging both the alarm
company ip address and my panel). Yet, they want to charge me an hourly
rate for a service call.

2- It is strongly recommended you have them activate in your panel (or
in your case do it yourself), "cancel codes" to assist in preventing
false dispatches I know how to do that.
3- Get a guarantee the station will call your complete calling list
before dispatching authorities at the end (larger companies only call
one, or at most two numbers before dispatching)

Good point.
I also want to check that there is no charge on their end (not the
fire/police) for false alarms if we accidentally trip something. We have
kids and we get a bunch of those...

I have found the truly best monitoring comes from some of the larger
independant monitoring stations, but these are usually only provided
to the end user through a legitimate dealer on their station.
Remember, there is a lot of bullsh*t out there permeated by large and
small dealers alike, and it can be pretty hard to know what's real and
what's not. It is definately a "buyer beware" market at all levels,
but more so for the uninformed consumer.

Can you list any nationally available or local to Boston area companies
that you have heard good things about...

Like everywhere, in every market, for every service, it's up to the
consumer to shop around !! If you wish to read further, my site may
assist....www.homemetal.com.

Thanks. Very helpful and seemingly unbiased approach!
You have confirmed my assumptions.

Basically, if you don't care about money, don't have the time to look
around, and are not very knowledgeable/capable of monitoring and
servicing the home end of the system then by all means pay premium
pricing.

If none of the above is true, then the monitoring itself is pretty much
a commodity so go with a lower priced company with a good reputation.

 

[blueman]

Go to that national service and find out the hard way. What they
promise and what they deliver is another story.
I have seen national centers take 20 minutes to dispatch a fire
system.

Yeah, my overpriced current company has a whole page of "scare" stories
of how people's houses burned down with ADT. I'm sure with the millions
of alarms out there times decades of history that anyone can cherry pick
a few colossal failures.

But we live in the world of statistics and risk-adjusted probabilities
not anecdoetes. The question is what is the additional risk to life and
property for going with a far cheaper service vs. the overpriced
regional monopoly. We makes such decisions all the time when we choose
what cars to drive, whether to cross a street, whether to play a contact
sport, etc. My guess is that we are talking millions of dollars of
excess premiums per potential life saved and thousands of dollars in
excess premiums per dollar of property damage averted. I can spend the
saved dollars in much better ways with significantly higher returns on
either safety or personal amusement.

Also, it's hard to believe that a UL-listed service would maintain its
certification if such extreme cases were anything but the rarest of
outliers. Plus, anything that extreme would probably be grossly
negligent opening them up to legal liability (but I will remember to
check to make sure that any company I choose is insured in case of the 1
in a billion case that my house burns down when we and our neighbors are
not around to hear the blood-curdling alarm and when the monitoring
station happens to choose that unlucky moment to take 20 minutes to
respond).

owe did I mention the phone calls in middle of night because
your system did not test or some other thing that could wait till
morning go ahead go to that other service you will gladly pay 10
times the cost to go back to what you have.

I will also check the refund policy in such cases where the call center
operators have nothing better to do than pester us in the middle of the
night with test failures and other crank calls (by the way my current
system monitored the regional over-priced monopoly wakes us up all the
time with transmit failures in the middle of the night).

I truly must laugh at how transparently biased and agenda driven the
respondants post is. Makes me chuckle...

 

[blueman]

Can you list any nationally available or local to Boston area companies
that you have heard good things about...

Just to clarify, I have a DMP XR200 system and I understand that not all
monitoring companies cover DMP

 

[Bob La Londe]

Just to clarify, I have a DMP XR200 system and I understand that not all
monitoring companies cover DMP

Yeah, but DMP can send other formats than DMP format. I thought you were an
expert on it? I've got a bunch of DMP panels out there sending contact ID
because it works better for the particular application.

 

[doug]

I am looking for honest, unbiased, unemotional answers to this
question. (I know it's Usenet, but one can always hope...)

I currently have a fire & burglary monitoring policy with the local
dominant alarm company. I own the equipment and I am responsible for
service charges to fix the equipment.

They charge me $36/month for straight Internet monitoring.

National online monitoring companies offer seemingly the same service
for $8.95/month. Or 1/4 the cost.

My high-priced local company claims:
- They are big (20,000 customers) - but the national competitor claims
40,000 customers

- Their service center is "local" -- but it's really halfway across the
state so does that really mean anything in the day of the Internet

- They are a "security company" vs. competitors being "monitoring"
companies. Though not sure what that means or why I care

- They have a 5-star UL-listed center - but the national competitor
claims to be UL-listed and it's not clear what 5-stars means and who
even grants such certification. Sounds like marketing hype.

- They have 30-second average response time -- but competitor claims the
same

- They say they have a better BBB track record than big national
competitors - but the competitor claims an A+ BBB rating which can't
be too bad

The bottom line is that I can't see one compelling reason to pay 4 times
the competitor rate for what seems to be a commodity service.

- I live in a very safe, low crime neighborhood.

- I primarily pay for the monitoring to get the insurance break.

- I don't stay up nights worrying about fires or burglaries and in any
case I still have the in-house alarm to warn me of a fire and scare
off amateur burgalers.

- I am technically adept and have no problem servicing and programming
my system

Seems like worst case perhaps the response time will be a few seconds
longer in some rare cases or maybe there is a small chance they will
make a mistake -- but the point is that there are so many other failure
points in a security system and we are talking about rare events (fire,
burglary) anyway.

So, why pay 4 times as much????

The bottom line is that alarm monitoring service is pretty much a commodity
nowadays. The reality is there is little difference in the monitoring
service if you pay $10 or $30 per month, the issues may come if you need
maintenance or repair service.

We no longer provide service to fire or burglar alarm systems that we don't
monitor and most service companies won't provide repair service to any
system they don't monitor, or if they do then they charge a premium price
for the service and don't attach any priority to it.

So, if you can handle the repair/service in-house, or are prepared to pay a
premium for repair service and save a couple of hundred per year on
monitoring, then take the lower cost monitoring, but be prepared to pay
substantially more for repair service if and when it is required.

We charge $35 a month for fire alarm monitoring and make no excuses for not
being the lowest price, do you get better monitoring service with us than a
$10 per month company, probably not. What you get is a prompt, reliable
response when you need service or repair, something you are unlikely to get
with the lower priced monitoring service

Doug

 

[blueman]

The bottom line is that alarm monitoring service is pretty much a commodity
nowadays. The reality is there is little difference in the monitoring
service if you pay $10 or $30 per month, the issues may come if you need
maintenance or repair service.

We no longer provide service to fire or burglar alarm systems that we don't
monitor and most service companies won't provide repair service to any
system they don't monitor, or if they do then they charge a premium price
for the service and don't attach any priority to it.

So, if you can handle the repair/service in-house, or are prepared to pay a
premium for repair service and save a couple of hundred per year on
monitoring, then take the lower cost monitoring, but be prepared to pay
substantially more for repair service if and when it is required.

We charge $35 a month for fire alarm monitoring and make no excuses for not
being the lowest price, do you get better monitoring service with us than a
$10 per month company, probably not. What you get is a prompt, reliable
response when you need service or repair, something you are unlikely to get
with the lower priced monitoring service

All of what you say makes sense and you certainly have the right to
charge whatever the market bears in our capitalist sytem. I would do the
same if I were in your situation.

For me the alarm system is pretty simple to diagnose/repair. Heck the
XR200 panel still uses a Z80 CPU and I was designing and
building computers with that processer 30 years ago.

In any case, the current company doesn't really fix much themselves
anyway - they just swap parts. These parts are readily available online
for a fraction of the cost they charge anyway. I don't even mind going
for a few days without service. My house is over 200 years old and
survived fine for its first 200 years without any alarms or monitoring.

By the way, the current company which installed the system did a pretty
crappy job in some areas with a number of the connections just twisted
together rather than soldered or connected with a solderless
connector. After a few years, I started getting faults which I tracked
down to these bad junctions. A little blob of solder fixed it all.

Bottom line though is that if you know simple electronics and computer
programmming, alarms are actually quite simple...

Just out of curiosity, does your $35/month include service or is that an
extra charge?

 

[blueman]

Yeah, but DMP can send other formats than DMP format. I thought you
were an expert on it? I've got a bunch of DMP panels out there
sending contact ID because it works better for the particular
application.

Yes I am aware of that but my preference was to stick with DMP
format. Maybe I should reconsider.

Does one lose any granularity of information in using another format?

By the way, I didn't claim to be an expert on any or all aspects of DMP. I said
that I know the panel better than the senior techs at the current
company. They just know what they are taught and what they use
day-to-day and there is frequent turnover. It's not rocket science and
the techs are not engineers by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[doug]

All of what you say makes sense and you certainly have the right to
charge whatever the market bears in our capitalist sytem. I would do the
same if I were in your situation.

For me the alarm system is pretty simple to diagnose/repair. Heck the
XR200 panel still uses a Z80 CPU and I was designing and
building computers with that processer 30 years ago.

In any case, the current company doesn't really fix much themselves
anyway - they just swap parts. These parts are readily available online
for a fraction of the cost they charge anyway. I don't even mind going
for a few days without service. My house is over 200 years old and
survived fine for its first 200 years without any alarms or monitoring.

By the way, the current company which installed the system did a pretty
crappy job in some areas with a number of the connections just twisted
together rather than soldered or connected with a solderless
connector. After a few years, I started getting faults which I tracked
down to these bad junctions. A little blob of solder fixed it all.

Bottom line though is that if you know simple electronics and computer
programmming, alarms are actually quite simple...

Just out of curiosity, does your $35/month include service or is that an
extra charge?

The $35 is what we charge for Commercial Fire Alarm monitoring, it does not
include service.

We charge $22 for Residential monitoring, again that does not include
service.

We don't have any residential accounts where service is included, but the
$36 that you are paying is inline with what some of our commercial customers
pay for burg monitoring with repair service included

Commercial burg monitoring rates vary depending on if service is included
and if service is included then the cost would depend on the size and
complexity of the system.

Doug

 

[Bob La Londe]

My thoughts also.......... My TROLL Detector has been activated and is in
"Alarm Condition".......... I KNOW DMP doesn't deal with homeowners at
all, this guy's BS is hard to swallow and smell......

Well, I was wondering how he got a copy of the software, but stranger things
have happened. I have Ademco profiles for some of the big players. They
just showed up in my mail one day in an unmarked envelope with no return
address, and an unreadable postmark. Since I never used them I might not
even still have them. I threw a lot away when I moved the office a few
years ago.

 

[blueman]

My main beef with the security industry is that few if any alarm
companies advise clients of the simple, no cost and low cost things
they should also do, plus the all important physical security
precautions that MUST be taken to ensure an adequate, OVERALL level of
security. Simply pushing electronic solutions because that's all they
sell, and not advising clients of all the necessary precautions, is
incompetent at best and dishonest at worst. As professionals, our
industry should be selling SECURITY, not just monitoring contracts !!

For 15 years before I got into this industry formally, I specialized
in physically securing homes against break in. I did thousands of
homes, and to my knowledge, never did one of my clients have a break
in after that. Several customers were attacked, but nothing came of
it. It's not rocket science; only common sense in most cases. Nor does
it cost much, and has no ongoing costs.

Sir, to this point, you seem to have thought out very well the
intricacies of monitoring services; you might want to do the same for
the physical secuirty of your home.

Excellent point! You are totall right about "security companies". The
irony is that while my current company was slamming the low cost
national competitors as just "monitoring companies" they themselves do
only 2 things: (1) make money monitoring (2) make money installing and
servicing the monitoring devices.

Not once in 7 years of service have they mentioned one single word about
physical security. Even their mailings to me are all really just ads for
more electronic services and boasts about the size of their new
monitoring center. Even when they did the wired installation which took
about 3 days, they never once made a *single* suggestion about physical
security. All they did was fished wires through this old house.

While you are totally right about physical security, I tend to not worry
too much about it in my neighborhood since we literally have been rated
the safest city/town in the US. That being said, I probably should still
pay more attention but...

 

[blueman]

My thoughts also.......... My TROLL Detector has been activated and is in
"Alarm Condition".......... I KNOW DMP doesn't deal with homeowners at all,
this guy's BS is hard to swallow and smell......

- Would you like to see the code I wrote that reverse engineers the DMP
ICOM protocol? (this is the protocol that DMP doesn't show anybody)
- Would you like to see a screenshot of my full version of Remote Link?
- Would you like to see a screeshot of me accessing the programming via
the display devices?
- Would you like me to send you pdf's of all the full DMP installation
and programming manuals?

You would be surprised at how much you can get by being 'nice' to the
installers, especially when you are able to help them by teaching them
things...

Just because you lack the skills to either access or figure out this
information by yourself, does not mean that others do too...

 

[blueman]

Well, I was wondering how he got a copy of the software, but stranger
things have happened. I have Ademco profiles for some of the big
players. They just showed up in my mail one day in an unmarked
envelope with no return address, and an unreadable postmark. Since I
never used them I might not even still have them. I threw a lot away
when I moved the office a few years ago.

As I said, they gave it to me since I was helpful to them when they were
beginning to rollout Internet monitoring since none of the techs then
knew very much about computers or the Internet...

However, I was able to reverse-engineer the protocol even without
RemoteLink since the DMP ICOM protocol is not encrypted. It just
required a little listening using Wireshark to figure out the protocol
and see that even the remote key is transmitted in the clear...

Maybe one day I will post to this group all the *gaping* security holes
in the DMP internet protocol in general and in the setup of my alarm
company in particular that would allow anybody with even a rudimentary
knowledge of computer programming to cause all type of
havoc both to individual customers and to the alarm monitoring companies
that service them. The holes ae big enough to drive a truck
through. Sadly, even the most low-end e-commerce company uses
inifinitely better security on their websites than DMP uses in its
protocol. Kind of ironic given that we are supposedly talking "security"
companies...

 

[blueman]

from experience, CRIMP those connections, else 1 - 10 years you'll see
false alarms again. I soldered some of my connections with the most
beautiful, perfect twist and solder wicking ever done, protected
inside home, yet 10 years they started failing!

You see, I did NOT listen to the 'uneducated' installers who had told
me 'crimp is better than solder', after all, I was skilled design
engineer educated at university and I knew better, NOT! Lesson:
Experience is the best education to learn about reliability. Go back
and make those connections gas sealed pressure type connections and
they will last longer than you.

Well, the 'uneducated' installers at my alarm company are taught to
twist and solder. Unfortunately, the ones that did my installation were
lazy and "forgot" to even solder about half the connections -- they were
just twisted. So by going back and soldering the joints, all I did was
bring the installation up to the level that the installers are supposed
to do according to their training.

Unless you are in some type of hostile environment (outdoors, near the
sea, chemical exposure), a good mechanical + solder connection should
last pretty much indefinitely. How do you think components are connected
inside the panel? I have made solder joints 40+ years ago that are still
good. If your joints are twisted, soldered, and taped in a 'normal'
environment and still failing I call either "bullshit" or that you are
not as good at soldering as you think. Perhaps you have some cold solder
joints? In 40 years of doing electronics, I have never seen a properly
done solder joint fail by itself (of course enough mechanical twisting
will break the joint but the wire itself would typical break even
ealier). Also, in my experience, CRIMP connections are at least as
likely to fail since a lot of people don't do a good job crimping -
either too much or too little crimping force or they don't insert the
wires properly. Also, a solder joint is both a mechanical and a
chemical/welded connection, so it is theoretically electrically superior
to a crimp connection.

Regarding your 200 year old house, concentrate on the fire alarm/
monitoring. From experience living in 100year old home, that wood
dries out to the point of burning as fast as gun powder. seriously
fast fire potential, plus they didn't seem to put fire blocks in the
walls like today.

That is why I have an alarm. My only claim is that the combined chance
of fire plus nobody being in or near the house to hear the alarm plus
the 'national' company taking 20 minutes to respond is pretty low. All
of those events (except maybe the second) are very low probability. The
chance of all 3 failing at the same time for any given individual
consumer (e.g., me) is extremely low (the product
of 3 low probabilities). Of course across the entire country there
may be a couple of anecdotes per year of such combined failure.

Just a note on service, I measure the service by whether I can REACH a
person, with a name and authority. If I can't reach a person, they're
blacklisted as a vendor.

Agreed!

 

[blueman]

Come to think of it, I can save lots of money on my IT needs by doing
business with companies that get rid of their high paid North American
employees and outsource everything to some third world country... After all,
a computer is a computer, and software is software

Well, you would be pretty *stupid* to be overpaying for commodity
service. Both products and services are source all over the world. If
the quality is the same, why overpay for computers, software or anything
else.. You do know that most computer parts are manufactured and
assembled overseas. Even Apple, that paradigm of a quality US company,
does nearly all of its manufacture and assembly overseas.

Of course, here I am just talking 'outsourcing' to another state in the
US. Hardly radical in the 21st centruy. I wouldn't think that there
would be too much of a language barrier with someone in Kansas calling
my fire or police department.

 

[blueman]

Yeahhhhh, later TROLL...........

Pot meet kettle.
I take that as you walking away with your tail between your legs...
Always interesting how people resort to name calling when confronted
with facts...

 

[blueman]

Come to think of it, I can save lots of money on my IT needs by doing
business with companies that get rid of their high paid North American
employees and outsource everything to some third world country... After all,
a computer is a computer, and software is software

Considering all the useless noise you add to this group, you must be one
of those 'sleazy' alarm scam artists that gives the whole industry a bad
name.

So far the sum total of your contribution to this group has been:
1. Post false accusations
2. Name call
3. Post irrelevant information as a 'scare tactic'

Please keep your noise on another thread...

 

[doug]

- Would you like to see the code I wrote that reverse engineers the DMP
ICOM protocol? (this is the protocol that DMP doesn't show anybody)
- Would you like to see a screenshot of my full version of Remote Link?
- Would you like to see a screeshot of me accessing the programming via
the display devices?
- Would you like me to send you pdf's of all the full DMP installation
and programming manuals?

Not really

Doug

 

[blueman]

BTW, the originator of this post (our suspected troll) show 982,467
posts to all his groups. Who the HELL has that much time on his hands
other than a troll ? Gawd....get a life man....

Well if your troll detector is as good as your ability to count my
posts, then that would explain why your troll detector is also
experiencing such a crazy false alarm

I truly hope that your alarm installations are a bit more reliable and
less prone to such wacky false alarms

(NOTE: for the humor impaired, I am teasing! I really appreciate
tourman's willingness to be helpful and am very thankful to him. Thank
you tourman!)

Since I actually know a thing or two about the Internet, I did a trivial
google groups search on myself: "+author:blueman
+author:<[email protected]>" and found a grand total of 490 threads
containing a post from me going back to 2003. Even that includes a
number of posts that are by someone else with the same id. Many of the
windbags on this group probably post more than that total 9 year volume
just to this newsgroup in one month )

I truly appreciate the few (including tourman) helpful posters but the
majority of participants here seem to be more interesting in scaring off
people and protecting their security system guild than in helping other
people.