edmscan said:
It does look like the RCMP is going MACOM, as well if you look at many major cities in Canada .. Macom is doing very very well. Calgary is one of the black sheep who went with the 'Big M'. Sometimes bigger isnt always better .....
My observations lead me to believe that if anything, it's split close to 50/50 right now, rather than being in favor of either system. The RCMP may be looking closely at M/A-COM, but only as you would hope they would, looking thoroughly at all options.
Having said that, I can tell you for certainty that there is a group of towns and counties surrounding Calgary and making up a large portion of Southern Alberta that were literally all but ready to sign the deal on an expansion of 753f (with Motorola equipment), but held off once the fact that the RCMP were looking to replace PACS was brought to light. Seeing as how there are a great number of services around Calgary that interact with one another, and the province may still have plans to regionalize EMS agencies, it only makes sense for this region to use a common system. Furthermore, there are other Motorola systems (Red Deer City for one) which would be easy to incorporate into a wider Motorola system.
Calgary's Motorola system isn't going anywhere, and as I said, considering the interaction that the emergency services experiences in this area, it only makes sense to expand 753f. For what it's worth, when G8 was in town in 2002, the RCMP went starry-eyed over the operation of the Smartzone (Motorola) system that was in place at the time.
Even more groups have left Calgary's EDACS system as well. ENMAX moved to 753f a couple years ago; Transit now has Animal Services and other such agencies joining it on MiKE/iDEN; etc.
I don't deny that those of you living in Lethbridge and Edmonton will contend that the province could just as easily go M/A-COM as I'm saying it could go Motorola. I would wager that the reality will be that Calgary will remain Motorola. Most places surrounding Calgary will probably go Motorola as well, including smaller towns with oddball trunk systems like Cochrane's MPT1327. I would expect that cities with large systems, i.e. Edmonton, may stay with their existing systems, regardless of what the RCMP/province chooses. It could be possible to interface/link the systems together, with patch groups and such, but that's a kludge and never a preferred result.
edmscan said:
We have very wide open spaces and really we have no need to talk to Calgary from up here.
Perhaps not, but remember what I said. I don't know what the landscape is like in Edmonton and area radio-wise, but right now, we have Calgary on 800mhz trunk, Rockyview on a number of UHF and VHF conventional frequencies, Foothills Regional (comprising 3 or 4 counties) on a myriad of VHF conventional frequencies, Wheatland County on VHF conventional, Mountain View on UHF conventional, Banff/Louise on an MSAT link, and Canmore on an IRLP link to Foothills Regional - and all of these agencies often work together and could benefit hugely from a common radio system. Furthermore, once (if) the health regions start controlling ambulance services and moving them across the entire region dependent on demand, wide-area communications will be imperative. Example: During the Pine Lake tornado response, ambulances from Foothills Regional EMS covered the city of Airdrie, on the opposite side of Calgary, and covered by a different dispatch center. None of FREMS's channels work in Airdrie, because there are no repeaters for those channels that far north. They were reduced to using cell phones for communication, and even those were sketchy, with the overloading of the cell networks with emergency comms for that disaster. A wide-area network would eliminate these problems.
Like I say, I don't know what Edmonton is like - if the city dispatches for regions outside, or if interoperability/inter-regional communications is a big issue. But it is here, and it is for the RCMP. That's why I beleive that the likelihood is that the province-wide system will use the system the majority of the services and agencies needing interoperability already have in place, and there will be some kind of patching going on to link the other services/agencies/systems for who this isn't as big an issue.
Having said all that, the topic of this thread is the future of Calgary's emergency services communications. Quite frankly, the mayor, as important a man as he may be, is not a radio tech to my knowledge. The announcement of this money to improve the communications services is most likely simply a release of money into the budgets of the agencies, to allow them to replace damaged/lost/obsolete radios, purchase additional dispatch consoles for the new dispatch center, etc. Much as, as I said in the earlier post, the 'new' emergency operations center is already nearing completion and will be occupied imminently.
