jrw14493
Member
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2003
- Messages
- 69
Quite a ride it’s been getting individual fire districts county-wide to switch to one new fire dispatch radio system. This new system is a county-wide VHF narrowband simulcast system. There are four repeaters county-wide from Naches to West Valley to Moxee that all make-up the new Yakima County Fire “County Main” frequency of 154.2575. The problem being with this narrowband stuff is county wide, we’ve been operating on the same frequency of 154.190 for decades and everyone in the county having to buy new narrowband capable radios and pagers is a nightmare for everyone, but a nice pillow for Motorola, Day Wireless and the guy that is going from district to district doing radio programming and installs.
Well, to solve this issue for now, the radio technicians left the old repeater up and put in the new narrowband repeaters and patched the two together so that fire districts that were using the old wide band repeater could talk to the people using the new narrowband repeater. Well, at some point towards the end of last week, the patch “disappeared.” In one fire district, some of the radios were switched to narrowband and some weren’t so they were unable to talk to one another; and they only found this out after a multi-agency response to a fire. The original date of the switch over being April 1 is coming and will be gone with half the county still using wideband, so the radio mechanics, in their infinite wisdom, pushed the switch-over date to April 15th. So, just an update to you all monitoring Yakima County Fire Main from wherever you may be (Moses Lake even) you will still here us on a good day on 154.190. When April 15th rolls along (we’ll try it again) see if you can pick us up on 154.2575 which will be the new frequency.
Well, to solve this issue for now, the radio technicians left the old repeater up and put in the new narrowband repeaters and patched the two together so that fire districts that were using the old wide band repeater could talk to the people using the new narrowband repeater. Well, at some point towards the end of last week, the patch “disappeared.” In one fire district, some of the radios were switched to narrowband and some weren’t so they were unable to talk to one another; and they only found this out after a multi-agency response to a fire. The original date of the switch over being April 1 is coming and will be gone with half the county still using wideband, so the radio mechanics, in their infinite wisdom, pushed the switch-over date to April 15th. So, just an update to you all monitoring Yakima County Fire Main from wherever you may be (Moses Lake even) you will still here us on a good day on 154.190. When April 15th rolls along (we’ll try it again) see if you can pick us up on 154.2575 which will be the new frequency.
