ButchGone said:
Thanks Ron! So, in order to monitor Cobb County Police I will have to monitor two trunked systems instead of just one?
Yes, in reality they all apart of one trunked system but with different simulcast sites. When the user has their radio on, it will affiliate with the tower/system closest to them. This means that if a Cobb County Sheriff unit was in Atlanta, you would hear him off the State system, as well as all the other traffic on that talkgroup. Likewise, if another patrol unit(s) were on the same talkgroup, but in Cobb County you would hear all the radio traffic on that talkgroup on both sites. However, since the Cobb County system has such great coverage, you will probably only rarely hear them on the State site, so you can mostly scan the former site and not miss much of anything.
ButchGone said:
Will this be the case when DeKalb County and others upgrade to digital?
Yes. I have not heard anything new on DeKalb County, but the last I heard they plan on joining the GEWIN TRS, and they are researching the funding and procurement of real estate to erect towers at this time. However, to the best of my knowledge, no construction has started at this point.
Dekalb County would become another simulcast system, with several towers all across the county. They would also connect via high-speed microwave to the Cobb County and State sites, to connect with the main site-controller, which is the master brain of the network. Further, the controller acts as a switching network and recognizes each radio and allows it to roam from one site to another, much like a cellphone network does.
Eventually, since Forsyth County is operating the same system technology as GEWIN, they maybe integrated into the system down the road. Ironically, everyone was hoping that Cherokee County would join GEWIN in the future, but they decided to go with M/A-COM instead. However, other counties in the Metro Atlanta area are taking a more serious look at GEWIN, rather than other vendors, but in the final run, governmental agencies tend to look at the bottom line when it comes to how much money will spent.
73's
Ron