Anne Arundel County Radio System Upgrade
- Thread starter ThePhotoGuy
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The Montgomery County policy I mentioned is for fire responses; I assume the EMS response policy was instituted a while back, but IDK.
Text of the order:
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service FIRE CHIEF’S GENERAL ORDER FCGO: 21 – 01 (revised) April 27, 2021 Page 1 of 1 TO: All MCFRS Personnel FROM: Fire Chief Scott E. Goldstein SUBJECT: Fire Routine Incident Responses The practice of responding “emergency” with lights and sirens to non-emergency incidents puts the public and MCFRS personnel at increased risk for injury. Therefore, effective April 27, 2021 (revised), MCFRS will begin dispatching lower-priority Fire Incident call types as Routine Responses. This will include fire alarms and home fire alarms, minor hazardous conditions, and service calls of various types. A full and revised list of these incident types and response plans will be published and maintained on Quicklinks. The ECC will dispatch units in the normal manner and will add the call type grouping “Fire Routine Response” and verbalize the units to “Proceed” to incidents that involve a non-emergency response. Example: “1200 Atlantic Avenue, Cross Street Saint James Place, Service Call for the Stuck Elevator, Routine Response. Tower 799 proceed on 7 Bravo. Box area 99-32.” Station alerting will vocalize “Fire Routine Response” and the incident type will contain the text “Fire Routine Response.” All units dispatched on these incidents will proceed to the scene without the use of emergency lights and sirens in a safe, but prompt manner, following all applicable Maryland motor vehicle laws. Once the units are on the scene and statused as such, emergency lights may be activated as needed to provide for safety and/or scene lighting. For further questions or clarification, contact the Emergency Communications Section Chief. Originally issued on January 4th, 2021
Text of the order:
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service FIRE CHIEF’S GENERAL ORDER FCGO: 21 – 01 (revised) April 27, 2021 Page 1 of 1 TO: All MCFRS Personnel FROM: Fire Chief Scott E. Goldstein SUBJECT: Fire Routine Incident Responses The practice of responding “emergency” with lights and sirens to non-emergency incidents puts the public and MCFRS personnel at increased risk for injury. Therefore, effective April 27, 2021 (revised), MCFRS will begin dispatching lower-priority Fire Incident call types as Routine Responses. This will include fire alarms and home fire alarms, minor hazardous conditions, and service calls of various types. A full and revised list of these incident types and response plans will be published and maintained on Quicklinks. The ECC will dispatch units in the normal manner and will add the call type grouping “Fire Routine Response” and verbalize the units to “Proceed” to incidents that involve a non-emergency response. Example: “1200 Atlantic Avenue, Cross Street Saint James Place, Service Call for the Stuck Elevator, Routine Response. Tower 799 proceed on 7 Bravo. Box area 99-32.” Station alerting will vocalize “Fire Routine Response” and the incident type will contain the text “Fire Routine Response.” All units dispatched on these incidents will proceed to the scene without the use of emergency lights and sirens in a safe, but prompt manner, following all applicable Maryland motor vehicle laws. Once the units are on the scene and statused as such, emergency lights may be activated as needed to provide for safety and/or scene lighting. For further questions or clarification, contact the Emergency Communications Section Chief. Originally issued on January 4th, 2021
tvengr
Well Known Member
Anyone know if WQNH763 is part of the new Anne Arundel County P25 system? I tried scanning the four 700 MHz frequencies, but get no indication of a control channel from my location..
Those are CMARC channels. They are licensed to the jurisdictions, so Baltimore County should also have a license for those freqs..
tvengr
Well Known Member
Thank you!
So, looking at the FY22 Capital Budget, the county in its wisdom has zeroed out funding for the Public Safety Radio System Upgrade project in FY22. The justification is to better align funding with the implementation schedule (uh-huh, sure /s.) They increased funding in FY23 to $10.3M. The administration is getting quite used to kicking the can down the road - hopefully there will not be another catastrophic failure in the meantime. People lose elections for basic government failure, ahem.
Also in the FY22 Capital Budget, the Zetron Tone Generator Replacement project has been zeroed out - permanently. This signals that at some point, Anne Arundel will be scaling back or eliminating the use of FTO. I actually don't have a problem with this because tone-outs for major incidents can be incredibly long. Not sure of the current vendor for Smartphone alerting, or the FSAS.
With how slow this rollout has been, it is not surprising.
A police unit stated he was having radio issues and the dispatcher said it will continue throughout the day as a tower was hit by lightning during the "midnight" shift. Fire was/is on Condition Red/Yellow.
Hopefully they have the spares available....
I've noticed that 856.0125 and 856.1625 have not been on rotation in the current TRS since November. I'm wondering if these will be the new control channels for the P25 system as they are licensed for the new sites.
I did a ride-by of the Edgewater site (Glebe Heights Water Reclamation Facility / future park,) and the Davidsonville site. Glebe Heights was fully kitted out tower with RF and MW equipment mounted, while what appears to be the future Davidsonville site is starting civil work.
Looked around at more greenfield sites today. The Arundel Wells site in Arnold had active site prep today; the Brooklyn Park Library / Brooklyn Heights Park site has a bunch of survey spikes in the ground; the new Crownsville site was quiet (I imagine they will improve the access road.)
Thank you for the updates!
The Davidsonville site has a huge new hole, and lots of long rebar stored at the site. Looks like they have to do some soil stabilization work, lol. It is bottomland (and who knows what's buried at an old Nike missile base....)
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