Cass County 800 countywide fire system

[obijohn]

I found a new license filing for a four site 800 Mhz analog system to be built for county wide fire department operations. looks like building on towers near plattsmouth, louisville, eagle and greenwood. Filed for 5 channels. It will be interesting to see if this is the answer to the interoperability needs of the volunteer fire departments. there was a definite need for being able to comunicate during multiple simultaneous incidents.

IMHO, with law enforcement already on 800 the county probably should have just built a trunking system and been done with it.

For those that are interested the repeater outputs will be:

856.06250
856.51250
857.06250
858.18750
859.18750

Nextel gave clearance for the shared spectrum.

 

[ORION_NE]

I read they are building a P25 system that will be apart of the state trucking system. Similar to what Lancaster county is doing.

 

[SDOG]

Cass County Upgrade

The system is going to be a 5 channel, 7 site system. Conventional Analog Simulcast.. There is another application into the FCC for the remaining sites.
So no P25 for the new system.
Trunking would have been nice, but folks are happy that the County Commissioners are leaning forward to make communications better!

VHF will still be used for paging and as a backup.

 

[PJH]

The big three radio manufacturers have essentially said goodby to the analog trunking.

Even though the equipment is capable of doing it, they are not offering it in new system packages. Unless you are going to have decent system loading, a P25 trunked system is wasted $$ in the cost/benefit factor.

In a county I worked for (much larger that Cass and about the entire population of Nebraska) we had fire on a multisite/simulcast dispatch channel, and each general battalion area had a "regional" operations channel. This allowed dispatching countywide - or getting ahold of any unit county wide on Channel 1, allows the incident command in Bat3 to talk to who he needed to on Channel 3 in that area, and the units operated on a simplex fireground channel for that area.

The radios were programmed as zone/bank. So if the incident was in region 4, it would be "Respond on Channel 4, fireground 4C". On the portable radios, firefighters simply move the toggle right to "C" while on channel 4. This put them on the fireground. In case of an emergency or needed to be back on the command channel, you'd place it to "A". There was no programming for "B"

After working where P25 is used for fireground, I have an issue with it. Where I am now, we were forced to the state P25 system but we maintain CSQ fireground simplex operations. Its kind of fubar still, but it works great.

 

[obijohn]

Thanks for that update SDOG. I also see an application for the city of Plattsmouth separate from the county applications. It would seem to be for interop. between PD and FD? I noticed it has IMSA coordination instead of APCO.

For those following this thread, the repeater output will be 857.76250.

 

[SDOG]

Plattsmouth Application

Obijon, It is for interop between both, but also for any event that needs to keep the dispatch channel clear. We had the opportunity to have our own channel separate from the simulcast system. With the amount of calls we run it only made sense to not clog up the simulcast system.

 

[obijohn]

And with IMSA coordination the rest of the city administration and public works would be able to communicate for the first time....now thats interoperability. it's time the public works and street dep't
got on board.