Statewide Radio System causing static

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jim202

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Every state has coverage issues with their current radio system. Take Virginia, they figured out real early on the radio system upgrade to a VHF trunking system, that there would be problems with agencies that were not on VHF. Their solution was to go out to bid and obtain a gateway system that would fill the gap. The state now has some 130 plus gateways up and running at the county and state 911 dispatch centers and mobile command vehicles. It works well and has filled the gap trying to connect non compatible radio systems together. There now are low band, VHF, UHF and 800 radio systems all tied together as needed.

You can take a look at the VIRGINIA COMLINC PROJECT by doing a simple search on the internet and get the facts. Maybe some of the radio geeks in CO should slow down just a little and look at what other agencies and states have done to solve the issues. It just costs too much to have to build 800 trunking sites in the mountains and then you have local agencies that are on different bands and can't afford to migrate to the new system. Seems like someone didn't do their homework very well and listened to a slick sales pitch from a radio vendor that was going to solve all the radio problems for those listening.
 

KB9LMJ

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Every state has coverage issues with their current radio system. Take Virginia, they figured out real early on the radio system upgrade to a VHF trunking system, that there would be problems with agencies that were not on VHF. Their solution was to go out to bid and obtain a gateway system that would fill the gap. The state now has some 130 plus gateways up and running at the county and state 911 dispatch centers and mobile command vehicles. It works well and has filled the gap trying to connect non compatible radio systems together. There now are low band, VHF, UHF and 800 radio systems all tied together as needed.

You can take a look at the VIRGINIA COMLINC PROJECT by doing a simple search on the internet and get the facts. Maybe some of the radio geeks in CO should slow down just a little and look at what other agencies and states have done to solve the issues. It just costs too much to have to build 800 trunking sites in the mountains and then you have local agencies that are on different bands and can't afford to migrate to the new system. Seems like someone didn't do their homework very well and listened to a slick sales pitch from a radio vendor that was going to solve all the radio problems for those listening.


THANK YOU!! My thoughts exactly!
 

kc0kp

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Las Animas county is the largest county in Colorado. It is the sixth largest county in the United States.
Las Animas County was one of the last counties in the state to migrate the CSP system from low band to high band VHF. The county was covered from one site north of Trinidad.
There are only 4 organised fire departments in the county, one of which, city of Trinidad is paid. For a time, the school district owned its own fire truck. They bought it when the high school in Primero burned down and no one responded. It did not have a two way radio.
There are no state forests in county and no state forest fire trucks. The west end has the San Isabel national forest with no forest service fire equipment stationed normally in the county.
So most of the county is unprotected. No protection, no need to cover radios from non existent fire trucks.
The state DTRS system serves its Las Animas County customers well. 99% of the population is covered. 99% of the Interstate Hiway is covered. 85% of the rest of the state hiways is covered.
It is pretty cost effective. 4 sites is 4 times as many as it used to have.
Where did it go wrong? Wildfires happen where no one lives and no one responds. Like someone else posted, these fires were way out of control in the first operational period when you are on your own anyway.
One aspect of the VHF system that was very handy is that one could relay information. A fire truck making a size up could have its information relayed by a trooper to dispatch. Can't do that with trunked.
You can still do that on 8CALL90D but you have to have someone listening to do that. That and the STAC frequencies are great for talking amongst yourselves but getting to a dispatcher is fairly inconvenient.
The commercial wireless systems have less coverage than the state does. I can only find 6 cell tower licenses for the county, all of them CDMA sites so I think there is something wrong with my search parameters. They cannot find a justification for more sites either. The last time I was down there, there was no EVDO service at all let alone 4G.
Where the article says DTRS does not cover was never covered with VHF either. Are there lessons to be learned? Yes. But this time DTRS is not the whipping boy.
Craig (end of rant) Sorry
 

towersites

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I just sorry that they had to rely on a vender to solve there communication issues. (Lack of RF Talent in there area of the State.) Better choices could have been made. Look at Boulder, they have the staff with RF experiance.
 
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Vendor designed radio system

Do you really think a vendor designed the system in use in LasAnimas County? If so, I think they did a great job. KcOkp hit the nail on the head. He said just what the Denver Post should have said. The paper didn't find much wrong with the radio system. A lot of states have had a terrible time with their new statewide systems. Colorado's installation seemed to go pretty well. No big blow ups in the news about it like in some states.

Does anyone on here think a slick salesman in wingtips just stopped by the capital one day making a cold call and sold a $300 million dollar radio systm. OR do you think a consultant was hired, engineering and surveys were done. Equipment was tested and vendors were consulted. Committees were formed to review proposals and investigate other state wide systems.

Which do you think happened?
 

superfreak

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I just sorry that they had to rely on a vender to solve there communication issues. (Lack of RF Talent in there area of the State.) Better choices could have been made. Look at Boulder, they have the staff with RF experiance.

Motorola never told anyone where to put sites. Site locations were determinedmore by what was feasible and what was available.

Motorola has very, very little influence over the system layout. Probably the first half of the almost 200 sites were built at existing VHF sites. There are FAR more many DTR sites than they had VHF. 95% of where VHF didn't cover DTR doesn't, and there are lots of places that DTR covers that VHF never did.

The article was pretty stupid calling out that DTR equipment "need" HVAC. All electronics do better with it. HVAC requires electricity, electricty requires generators for backup. As for the comment about the emails stating outages; it is because with the old analog VHF systems they would fail and no one would notice till it was needed. It could be weeks before a trooper noticed a remote VHF repeater didn't function. With a monitored systm and emails system failures and system maitanence can be distrubted promptly.

What is more stupid than the "incompadability" of DTR with local agencies, it is those same local agencies like Fremont and Garfield counties using proprietary Motorola ADP encryption on the system. They effectively shut out CSP, DOW/Parks. No one from the "state" twisted their arm on that one.


Sure more money would make the system more robust. To say that the people working on the system have no enough RF backround is amazing. Kind of calling the kettle black. I am pretty sure of few of the early on engineers had ham licenses and probably a few of the current people do to.

It was never built to be what it has become. That is good and bad. It was thought of to be a overlay of the state highway system, it was not intended to be used like it is today. However, local agencies see how well it works and decided on their own to transition.

rant off.
 
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Air Conditioning Requirement for DTRS

Yes the reporter made a dumb comment regarding the AC requirement for DTRS equipment. It just shows that once again the reporter didn't have any knowledge of the subject and didn't get good information. These articles are just horrible sometimes.

In my opinion, if a county or city wants to option encryption modules for their radios and use them that's just fine. They can always turn encryption off and talk to the CSP or fire department or whoever is on the system. I'll bet CSP has some radios with encryption.
 

superfreak

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Yes the reporter made a dumb comment regarding the AC requirement for DTRS equipment. It just shows that once again the reporter didn't have any knowledge of the subject and didn't get good information. These articles are just horrible sometimes.

In my opinion, if a county or city wants to option encryption modules for their radios and use them that's just fine. They can always turn encryption off and talk to the CSP or fire department or whoever is on the system. I'll bet CSP has some radios with encryption.

Fremont county, except for their infrequently used county MAC is encrypted. Don't know if they were given the switch to turn it off. With all of the interagency communications with state parks and the river, they should just leave it off. Most of the state mobile radios are older and do not have adp available to them. ADP is motorola only, so none of the other vendors have it. Since the other vendors are making inroads and offering decent radios and cheaper prices, ADP is going to be a thorn in everyone's side. Especially those agencies using it. They are now stuck with Motorola pricing.
 

kg9nn

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800MHz vs VHF

I really enjoyed reading this article about the Colorado statewide TSY. I know that the FCC has assigned 800 mhz frequencies to this system; however, I have a question.

Wouldn't it be possible to replace 800 mhz with VHF frequencies?

Been there, been done by that. Here was my experience:

1. Frequency Coordination
There are more frequency pairs available on 800MHz than on VHF. In a metro area, obtaining (say) five pairs of frequencies for just a dozen tower sites is not possible. With 800MHz there are often more (but not always) more frequencies available. Also, keep in mind that with 800MHz, the band was planned for repeaters while VHF was not. In order for combiners to work (see next item) you need 250kHz between frequencies and as many MHz between the inputs and outputs as possible. Heaven forbid the frequency coordinator tells you that all but one of your VHF pairs is going to be input high / output low. Then all is lost.

2. Antenna System - Combining
Option 1 - you spend $35k on a combiner with a single or two (TX/RX) antenna. If you were on 800MHz, the cost would be lower. In order to combine you need 250kHz inter-pair separation plus adequate TX/RX separation. See frequency coordination above. If you opt not to combine you're venturing into inter mod hell.
Option 2 - you don't combine. Tons of filters and tuned cavities. In the case of tower rent, five antennas times 300 feet x $2/feet/month = $3k/mo x 36 months = $108k in taxpayer dollars, times ten sites, that's $1M. Clearly combining is going to be more cost-effective, but you have to be able to get frequencies suitable.

3. Performance
If you're outside VHF, works pretty well. Inside, the 800MHz HTs have higher gain antennas and sometimes perform better. In rough terrain, I will echo the comments of other posters - UHF works well. VHF is in second place, and 800MHz is in third. Of course, you can compensate for that with lots of extra towers :) And more frequencies or $imulcast.

In the case of a system I'm working on now, we have two "sites" both at the same tower. One site is VHF and serves mobiles, the other site is UHF and serves portables. Most customers want to go with just HTs (after they replace the fourth or fifth one, mobiles start sounding like a better idea to them). So the load between the two sites is very fluid.

To sum it all up:

If you're a largely rural state, and your major metros are going to have their own 800MHz system (ergo you only need a few pairs to cover the big cities), then go VHF.

If your state needs to cover rural and metro areas or has tier 2 and tier 3 cities spread all over the place (thus complicating VHF coordination) then 800 is the most "practical" way.

Your mileage may vary, no warranties or guarantees either expressed or implied. Atmospheric and terrain variations may affect coverage. Not responsible for errors or omissions, riots, acts of war, terrorism, fire, flood, famine, locusts, plague, etc.
 

towersites

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I was not refering to the State. The System works for them. I was making referense to the County not doing enough homework to see if it was going to work for them. I would have been fired if I put a public safety team at risk in our County. We always use pubilc works as our test bed before we even think of moving safety.
 

towersites

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The system has over 55,000 users, covers more than 93% of state roadways. Roadways!!!!
What you gona do when your not near a roadway???
Spend 2.8 Million More!!!! Or Stay with something that works and Narrow Band why you are at it.
 
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Colorado radio system

From what I know or have read about the Colorado system, it works very well and covers a majority of the state. If 2.9 mil will fill in the remaining holes, than that is great. Colorado is way ahead of many states in the design and installation of a system like this. The system works and as they discover dead areas, they will be fixed. How much do you spend to cover no man's land? Maybe they could have driven one of the 5 $380,000 mobile command posts out there to provide radio coverage for a once in a lifetime fire. They probably don't want to share the mobile command post.
 

kc0kp

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From what I know or have read about the Colorado system, it works very well and covers a majority of the state. If 2.9 mil will fill in the remaining holes, than that is great. Colorado is way ahead of many states in the design and installation of a system like this. The system works and as they discover dead areas, they will be fixed. How much do you spend to cover no man's land? Maybe they could have driven one of the 5 $380,000 mobile command posts out there to provide radio coverage for a once in a lifetime fire. They probably don't want to share the mobile command post.
First, the mobile command posts are a shared resource. If called for, they HAVE to respond. One was at the Four Mile fire for over a week. Second, while they have radios on all bands except low band, their mission is command. The top tier of the ICS response tree uses the truck to administer and direct the response. There are seperate communications trucks also available that would be more applicable to the mission. They have gateways, multiple radios on multiple bands with multiple modulation formats and caches of radios to hand out to responders.
Like anything else, the proper tool for the job makes it easier.
Craig
 
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greenthumb

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The system has over 55,000 users, covers more than 93% of state roadways. Roadways!!!!
What you gona do when your not near a roadway???
Spend 2.8 Million More!!!! Or Stay with something that works and Narrow Band why you are at it.

I don't think that using a metric like 'percentage of the state covered' would be a useful metric to describe what the system covers, so I would think that the metric they use for percentage of the roadways that are covered is fine. However, we all know that the system covers plenty of area off the roadways. The roadway coverage strategy fits the state's business - if counties or municipalities need additional coverage, they should realize that and add it.
 

superfreak

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Early on, probably existing sites, a few years ago, where the grants where applied for. Today, filling in the holes.

As always
Land available
Power availability
Access
Microwave path
Virtually no land costs, so usually government owned property
Who is paying
CCNC

A lot has been accomplished with far far less than other statewide systems.
 

Warbirdhunter

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Early on, probably existing sites, a few years ago, where the grants where applied for. Today, filling in the holes.

As always
Land available
Power availability
Access
Microwave path
Virtually no land costs, so usually government owned property
Who is paying
CCNC

A lot has been accomplished with far far less than other statewide systems.


I understand. Thank you sir.
 
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