Lake County Moving to MARCS

I read in the Plain Dealer today that Lake County has Homeland Security money to move from their own system to MARCS. I thought I remembered someone posting that MARCS won't let a large city use the system for their day to day operations. Is Lake County just not large enough (as compared to Cleveland) to cause them any worries?

From what I read, the articles stated objective and the grant total don't add up. A lot of the article is based on statements made by a local Congressman. I think they were general comments taken out of context.

The article says that the $800,000 grant money is to be used to upgrade 3000 radios benefitting Lake, Cuyahoga and Geauga counties.

With $800,000 they would be hard pressed to upgrade all of the Lake County users (police, fire, ems, school buses, Perry Nuclear Power Plant, LakeTran, etc..).

$800,000 divided by 3,000 equals $267. The radios required to work with MARCS cost in the thousands each. It's most likely that the City of Mentor will be using the grant to upgrade it's public works and safety forces radios to work with both Lake County's 800 system and MARCS.

MARCS is getting close to being maxed out and I doubt that it could absorb Lake County. I've heard it will be probably 5-6 years before MARCS is upgraded to where they could begin to look at bringing in a large system. Besides that, I believe Lake County has a good system in place now and probably wouldn't see much benefit by a complete switch to MARCS.

Mike

Here is the article in question. I can't tell if they're planning on moving to MARCS or if their trunked system will just be able to interface with MARCS if necessary.

From what I heard from a local system administrator is that it will be linked into MARCS but will be its on system allowing for roaming between the two. Now how the roaming is done either by radio or talkgroup I am not sure.

ajpritch said:

From what I heard from a local system administrator is that it will be linked into MARCS but will be its on system allowing for roaming between the two.

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Correct...

Now how the roaming is done either by radio or talkgroup I am not sure.

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Depends on the personality in the radio programming. Some personalities can be set up to allow roaming on the talkgroups within them and other personalities can be set up so roaming is not allowed. For example, local service department talkgroups and some local-use-only public safety talkgroups might be set up to allow no roaming, while certain other public safety talkgroups in another personality are allowed to roam to the limits allowed by that personality.