2015 FRCC Additions

[Spitfire8520]

Well folks, sounds like FRCC will be making its first major expansion since going online last year. Broomfield and the Northern Colorado Regional Communications Network (NCRCN), geographically Larmier County, are looking to switch over to FRCC sometime in the future.

I know we have had discussions in the past regarding whether or not Broomfield would be staying or going: http://forums.radioreference.com/colorado-radio-discussion-forum/277150-broomfield-remain-dtrs.html. Several months ago, there was notice that Broomfield was going to build out two towers: http://forums.radioreference.com/co...broomfield-approves-two-new-radio-towers.html. There were questions to whether or not this would be for DTRS or FRCC.

Earlier this month Broomfield signed IGAs with ADCOM and North Metro to switch to over to FRCC and build out their two sites as a simulcast on the North Metro stations for radio coverage, details available in this PDF. The targeted date for cut-over is around October 2015.

As for Larimer County, the only details so far is that they are planning on switching to FRCC in the future with an unknown date and will be bringing along several of the sites that they currently own.

 

[Kevin_N]

Thanks for the info and the PDF is an interesting read.

 

[natedawg1604]

Someone who wrote that PDF must have been drinking great Koolaid: it says the new Broomfield FRCC sites will facilitate "interoperability" with WESTMINSTER PD. Seriously? Even when Westy wasn't encrypted, they had their own radio system outside of FRCC, and there has been ZERO hint that anyone in the Denver-Metro area will actually implement ISSI. WTF???

 

[Spitfire8520]

Someone who wrote that PDF must have been drinking great Koolaid: it says the new Broomfield FRCC sites will facilitate "interoperability" with WESTMINSTER PD. Seriously? Even when Westy wasn't encrypted, they had their own radio system outside of FRCC,

I think the related quote to that is:

Westminster Police Department has a "stand-alone" system with a direct link to the FRCC network.

Not too many people here actually follow Westminster, but I think Westminster and FRCC might have been actually been the first Denver Metro ISSI implementation. I don't know the extent of their implementation. I also think FRCC has a much nicer policy on sharing their system keys with Westminster compared to anyone else. There are times where you'll see Westminster PD come up directly on some of the Adams County TGs to communicate directly with them as opposed to Westminster having to switch to a NWF TG to talk to any other agency.

and there has been ZERO hint that anyone in the Denver-Metro area will actually implement ISSI. WTF???

It has been in the process of being implemented for some time now. A majority of the ISSI implementation related to DTRS has been with MARC so far. Once Harris and Motorola have figured out their ISSI, DTRS and FRCC will be next in line. I would expect the implementation of that ISSI to be smoother since it will be implemented across two Motorola systems.

I believe the first targets for any ISSI with DTRS is the current NWF setup. If you've listened to Green 1 or Metro Net in the past couple of months, then you have heard the implementation of ISSI first hand.

 

[jfab]

For us less educated people, what is issi?

 

[Spitfire8520]

For us less educated people, what is issi?

P25 Inter-RF Subsystem Interface. It is a non-proprietary standardized interface that all P25 systems should have that allows for any P25 system to be networked together into a wide area network, regardless of manufacturer or radio band. This allows for things like shared talkgroups, roaming, and other miscellaneous P25 things like Radio IDs and emergency calls. Please note that I do not work on any P25 system, so my explanation may include some errors in understanding.

In the Denver Metro area, ISSI can be compared to NWF where being on the same talkgroup across the different systems means you can talk to everyone else. The difference between ISSI and NWF is that I believe the NWF talkgroups are established by attempting to stream audio between the different systems. The problem with this is that this may allow for users on different systems to step on each other without realizing it, and audio between systems can end up being encoded - decoded - re-encoded - re-decoded when dealing with digital audio that could potentially lead to bad audio. ISSI basically streams P25 packets between the system, so it the audio would only need to be encoded once by the radio transmitting and decoded once by the radio receiving. It should also help with stopping users from stepping on each other.

ISSI allows for different kinds of roaming, depending on how the vendor sets up their ISSI. As I understand it, if a TG is setup to roam with ISSI, then it will take care of registering the radio with the other system without having to program the receiving system to accept the radio beforehand. One can setup the ISSI to either manually roam, where the user has to manually switch to the other system, or to seamlessly roam, where ISSI will allow a subscriber unit to roam from one system to another with no user action. This is different than the current NWF where if Denver were in a deadzone, then they would be out of luck with coverage even if a DTRS tower were overhead and they didn't already program DTRS on their radio with the proper system keys.

As for the other features, it allows for Radio IDs to be carried over from one system to another. This is more useful for Dispatch so that they can see who exactly is talking on an Interoperability talkgroup as opposed to having to guess. This also allows them to see and hear their units if they were roaming on a different systems, and if their unit on a different system were to initiate an emergency call.

With the Denver Metro area, I believe a majority of the systems will only use ISSI with NWF. FRCC and DTRS might also include other things like certain CSP Troops and the MACs since they cover a larger geographic area and have areas with poor coverage.

 

[jfab]

Thank you for the excellent explanation!

 

[Spitfire8520]

Goodbye to Broomfield. Sounds like they may have switched over yesterday. They are a little bit late on their targeted October date, but stuff happens.